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