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ENIAC (/ ˈ ɛ n i æ k /; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) [1] [2] was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all.
The Manchester Baby was designed as a test-bed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory, rather than as a practical computer.Work on the machine began in 1947, and on 21 June 1948 the computer successfully ran its first program, consisting of 17 instructions written to find the highest proper factor of 2 18 (262,144) by trying every integer from 2 18 − 1 downwards.
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), [1] was the first electronic stored-program computer.It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.
The Manchester Mark 1 was dismantled and scrapped in August 1950, [28] replaced a few months later by the first Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. [1] Between 1946 and 1949, the average size of the design team working on the Mark 1 and its predecessor, the Baby, had been about four people.
The very first time a stored-program computer held a piece of software in electronic memory and executed it successfully, was 11 am 21 June 1948, at the University of Manchester, on the Manchester Baby computer. It was written by Tom Kilburn, and calculated the highest factor of the integer 2^18 = 262,144. Starting with a large trial divisor ...
The computer was a huge machine with 40 black 8-foot panels. The programmers had to physically program it using 3000 switches, and telephone switching cords in a dozen trays, to route the data, and the program, through the machine. [3] This is the reason why these women were called "computers".
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, [1] and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd. It was the world's first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored program digital computer. [a]
Colossus is thus regarded [2] as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. [ 3 ] Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers [ 1 ] based on plans developed by mathematician Max Newman at the ...