Baby! 1

Transcription

In about 1966 I asked Professor Kilburn, why is it whenever I open a computer science textbook I get the American origins of computers but the Brits are nowhere? So Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and said those who need to know do know What was special about the Baby was that such a computer can be used for a wide variety, perhaps almost an infinite variety of problems It was an engineering testbed to test out the reliability of a memory invention The central problem of the computer was recognised to be the problem of storage and so the problem was quite simply brought to my notice Cathode ray tubes were used widely during the second world war for radar purposes It's a way of displaying electronic signals on a screen that you can see In a Williams and Kilburn storage tube each little element of the screen was excited by the electrons and became charged and each area of stored charge was made to represent a binary digit, a 1 or a 0 F.C. was a member of the telecommunication research establishment which was called TRE At the end of the war he was offered a post at Manchester university and he accepted with enthusiasm and he took one of his chaps, Tom Kilburn and also asked for other bright young men, so I was the next one It was a very exciting time, there were a very small number of people who worked together very closely indeed Tom Kilburn worked on the CRT memory and in about a year he'd actually moved from one bit of storage to one thousand to two thousand bits of storage In December '47 what had arrived was a memory which could show static pictures now what we needed to check was that those pictures could actually change, be recorded properly, and do that at electronic speeds. That's really why the Baby was built It consisted of 6 ft 6" high post office racks, 23 inches wide all round the laboratory It was just a simple room It had no air conditioning so we always had windows open and things in those days, you know, to keep the temperature sensible This was the centre of Manchester and in with the fresh air came the dirt Tom and I wore lab coats a long coat down to your mid-thighs or knees We avoided electric shocks by the classic artifice of keeping one hand in your pocket all the time and never to touch anything with both hands at once We had a couple of technical staff who did did the actual building One of the best wiremen we had was Ida Fitzgerald I think was her surname She delivered the chassis wired to our diagram and we would look at it and say oh dear, I didn't mean to do that and we would proceed to alter Ida's neat wiring Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill had been struggling for some days The machine kept failing, perhaps it was a wiring error or some soldered joint had failed and then one day it all held together and worked not just once but twice but three times and they realised we've made it Finally when we pressed the start button it set off on this usual dance of death and then suddenly it stopped and there in the expected line was the expected answer so we'd built a computing machine We went out to lunch in the canteen as usual, and we were actually having lunch instead of having brought in sandwiches, that was the way we celebrated What was needed now was to develop both the programming side and the arithmetic side to develop this universal machine The Baby was then expanded over the next 18 months to create the Manchester University Mark 1 computer. It was made about three times bigger, it had a lot more store and so on By then, as far as the engineers were concerned, the Baby computer was old hat There's nothing left at all of the Baby or the expanded Baby In fact the racks that the Baby and the expanded Baby were built on were used for the next machine that we built In 1994 I realised that in four years time it would be the 50th anniversary of the Baby computer. I put together a proposal as to how we could build a replica of that original machine Tom Kilburn and I both vetted it and approved it and as we said to each other when we saw it, oh this is all wrong of course, it's nice and clean We completed the replica build and re-enacted the running of the world's first program They operated the switches, the program ran, they stood back, watched it on the display tube, saw the answer was correct and then turned away and grinned at the audience, as if to say there we can do it again Normally the people who did the original work tend to fade into obscurity In England it's scientists and theoreticians who tend to get the glory It's good that we remember the contribution of the electronic engineers to the information age, to the second industrial revolution if you like Manchester University now has a Tom Kilburn building which in fact contains two laboratories known as the Tootill laboratories Computers are everywhere today in places unimaginable to the pioneers The Baby started off with a thousand bits of storage and now there's so much storage everywhere, you know a million million million amount of storage, that in my terms is science fiction How do you foresee the development of computers over the next decade? I'm not really interested in computers, I made one and I thought one out of one was a good score so I didn't make any more