Electronic Digital Computers
[ London ]: MacMillan & Co., Ltd. 1948. First Edition. [CXXIX]-CXXX, [469]-506, CXXXIII-CXXXVIII pages. 6 7/8 x 9 3/4 inches. Apparently lacking original issue wrappers with evidence of paper removal at the spine front and rear wrappers. Contains the article "Electronic Digital Computers" IN Nature Vol. 162 No. 4117 pp. 487, September 25, 1948. Very Good. Wraps. [24231]
This issue contains a one page description of an Electronic Digital Computer operating "for some weeks in the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory" in the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Manchester. It was a machine primarily set up for proof of concept with the ability to program in the same sense as computers are today: "...apart from its small size, the machine is, in principle, 'universal' in the sense that it can be used to solve any problem that can be reduced to a programme of elementary instructions ; the programme can be changed without any mechanical or electro-mechanical circuit changes."
With a storage capacity was only 32 'words' each of 31 binary digits, it was intended a very early proof of concept, and was probably the machine that is now known as the "Manchester 'Baby', the first stored-program electronic computer" which evolved into the Ferranti Mark I. The Manchester facility played significant roles in the development of early computers, with the Ferranti machine, early conferences starting in 1948, and even early computing conducted by Alan Turing on his Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis occurring there.
F. C. Williams was the chairman of electrotechnics at Manchester University. With his associate at Manchester, Tom Kilburn, they invented the Williams tube electrostatic memory system (also called the Williams-Kilburn CRT store), "the first truly high-speed random access memory".
See Origins of Cyberspace 1066, 1067 for more information on the Manchester Computing machine. This article is not noted in Origins of Cyberspace - only indirect references to the Manchester 'Baby' machine were found.
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