The 60-year-old Baby

Baby has been in the news this week. She'll be 60 on Saturday. Why am I excited? Well Baby, more properly known as the Small Scale Experimental Machine, was the world's first stored program computer, and so is the logical ancestor of every single computer on the planet, including the one you're using to read this.

Ten years ago, for Baby's 50th anniversary, a bunch of enthusiasts led by the men who originally worked on the project built a replica of the machine using all original parts. It's now on permanent display at MOSI. At one of our last-ever Engineering Conferences, one of the project members gave us an entertaining talk about the rebuild, the fun they'd had and the lengths they'd gone to to find the original parts to use. When Baby was first assembled, money was tight (when was it ever NOT tight for British science?) and they scrounged bits from all over, including buttons from Spitfire cockpits to use on the console. Naturally in 1998 these were pretty hard to come by! They managed it though. If you get chance, go and see Baby. It is a WORKING replica, and it's quite a challenge to think of a program you can write in only 32 instructions - the limit of Baby's memory space.

There's another interesting link that stems from this project. The next machine to be built in Manchester, developing the architectures and ideas used in Baby, was the Manchester Mark I. Two of the Mark I team - mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods - would later marry, and their son Tim Berners-Lee would go on to invent the World Wide Web.

I listened to the Radio 4 coverage of the anniversary today, on which the presenter mentioned that Baby didn't use transistors because they'd only just been invented and were very unreliable. Instead, the scientists used valves - much more common and reliable in those days. I was amused that he then had to go on to explain what valves were! Makes me feel old, realising that there are now more people in the world that have never heard of valves than have.