June 19, 1998. Copyright, 1998, Graphic News. All rights reserved

BABY CELEBRATES 50TH BIRTHDAY
By Oliver Burkeman

LONDON, June 19, Graphic News: THE BIRTH of computers as we know them, at 11 oÕclock in the morning 50 years ago this Sunday [June 21], was a distinctly unceremonious affair. The 7ft [2.1m] high, 1.5 ton machine built by Professor Freddie Williams and his 26-year-old researcher, Tom Kilburn, at Manchester University in England was not even named until six months after it had been successfully switched on, when someone finally labelled it ÔBabyÕ.
The scientific paper announcing the new arrival hardly hinted at BabyÕs revolutionary importance. ÔThe machine is, in principle, universal in the sense that it can be used to solve any problem that can be reduced to a program of elementary instructions,Õ wrote Williams and Kilburn in the journal Nature.
But that modest claim described an achievement on which all modern computing depends: the invention of software.
BabyÕs forerunners were prehistoric in comparison. Neither Colossus Ð used in World War Two to crack GermanyÕs Enigma code and thus detect the positions of U-boats in the Atlantic Ð nor the American ENIAC machine, first intended to help gun crews set their targets, were capable of storing a program. Changing the task they were set meant resetting thousands of switches or, at best, feeding in hundreds of punched cards.
But Baby possessed random access memory (RAM) Ð the ability to store binary numbers and then refer back to them in order to perform calculations Ð so it could be programmed to perform any mathematical task by keying in instructions on its 32 push-buttons. The race for RAM had preoccupied teams of scientists at Cambridge and Teddington in the UK and Philadelphia in the U.S., but Kilburn and Williams had cracked it. 
Using cathode ray tubes, with which they had worked as wartime engineers, they gave Baby the ability to store numbers as electrical charges, visible as dots of light, which it used to solve numerical problems. 
ÔThe spots on the display tube entered a mad danceÉ but one day they stopped and there, shining bright in the expected place, was the answerÕ, recalled Williams, who died in 1977. ÔIt was a moment to remember... and nothing was ever the same again.Õ
That isnÕt a version of history with which everyone would agree. A stored-program computer called EDVAC, developed at the University of Pennsylvania, has also laid claim to the title. But though the two machines were built simultaneously, Williams and KilburnÕs brainchild was the first to run its stored program successfully while the Pennsylvania researchers were still struggling with the theory. Unchristened, unassuming, and born without a fanfare, Baby had changed the face of computing forever.
In Manchester on Sunday a functioning replica, built by ex-ICL engineer Chris Burton, will run a new program Ð the result of a worldwide competition to celebrate BabyÕs fiftieth birthday. The winning entry, sent from Japan, is designed to time the cooking of noodles.
ENDS

Source: University of Manchester, Time-Life Books: Understanding Computers