June 20, 2008
Baby turns 60 on June 21st
An old Baby you ask -- yes. Baby was the name of a one ton machine that was the first computer to ever run a stored program. From The BBC:One tonne 'Baby' marks its birth
Sixty years ago the "modern computer" was born in a lab in Manchester.
The Small Scale Experimental Machine, or "Baby", was the first to contain memory which could store a program.
The room-sized computer's ability to carry out different tasks - without having to be rebuilt - has led some to describe it as the "first modern PC".
Using just 128 bytes of memory, it successfully ran its first set of instructions - to determine the highest factor of a number - on 21 June 1948.
"We were extremely excited," Geoff Tootill, one of the builders of Baby told BBC News.
"We congratulated each other and then went and had lunch in the canteen."
Mr Tootill, and three other surviving members of the Baby team, will be honoured by the University and the British Computer Society at a ceremony in Manchester.
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