Baby that launched computer age is now an oap

BRINGING up baby: Tom Kilburn (left) and Geoff Tootill at the 50th birthday celebrations in 1998

SIXTY-five years ago today Chadderton engineer Geoff Tootill helped to usher in the age of the modern computer.

He was a member of the team at Manchester University which built Baby, the first machine capable of running electronically-stored programs, on June 21, 1948.

That first program — to determine the highest factor of a number — has been described as the birth of software and underpins modern computing.

The number chosen was quite small, but within days they let Baby loose on the highest factor of the number 218. The correct answer was found in 52 minutes, involved 2.1 million instructions and accessed the electronic memory 3.5 million times — the sort of effort achieved by a modern home computer in a fraction of a second.

The modern world on which the great-great-great grandchildren of that invention are built is now able to send information around the world in a microsecond — including a new film about the birth of Baby, made by Google to celebrate the anniversary.

Tootill worked with professors Fred Williams and Tom Kilburn on the computer — officially the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine.

Born in Birchenlea Street, Chadderton, the engineer was also later involved in designing and building the first commercially-available mainframe computer.

Baby was a test bed for the experimental Williams-Kilburn tube — a way of storing binary digits, or bits, using a cathode ray tube.

Until then, programs had to be stored on paper tape or were hard-wired into the computer circuits, making the process both slow and complicated.

“The greatest problem facing all the early computer design groups was how to devise a suitable memory or storage system,” said Prof Simon Lavington, a research student in Kilburn’s Manchester team from 1962-1965.

“The University of Manchester was the first to get its storage system working at electronic speeds — it was the first random-access memory. Baby marked the start of the digital revolution.

“Manchester played a leading role in this revolution — just as it did in the Industrial Revolution, 200 years earlier.”

Google’s film tells the story of Baby’s birth and features archive footage and interviews with some of Manchester’s early computing pioneers.

Though nothing remains of the original Baby, a working replica is on display at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry.

See the film at: http://youtu.be/cozcXiSSkwE