Baby celebrates 60th anniversary
It’s almost 60years to the day since the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) – the world’s first stored program computer – ran its first program.
Affectionately known as ‘Baby’, the machine was developed by Freddie Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill at the Victoria University of Manchester and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. Although designed and built as a test bed for the Williams tube, its success resulted in the development of the Ferranti Mark I, one of the first commercially available general purpose computers.
Kilburn wrote the first program, which was designed to find the highest proper factor of 218 by trying every integer from 218 - 1 downwards. Comprising 17 instructions, the program took 3.5million operations and 52 minutes to produce the answer.
