A new view of the Manchester Computer | Hacker News Reader

A new view of the Manchester Computer

rylandscollections.com

96 pointsdcminter13 comments

If you're in the manchester area then you can see a replica of the Baby at the Museum of Science and Technology [1] in Manchester. Entrance is free, donation encouraged. As far as I know the original no longer exists.

And then wander down to the other end of Deansgate and check out the John Rylands library [2] - an incredibly impressive gothic building stuffed full of old books, and whose blog the article is on.

[1] https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...

[2] https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/visit/

I have read that the Baby was disassembled and parts of it used to build the Mark 1. The Baby had been a proof of concept system for the Mark 1 design.

There has been quite a bit of debate [1] about who was first with a working electronic von Neumann (in the widest sense of the word) design, the modified ENIAC or Manchester Baby. I have to say that I'm a bit torn and can see both sides on this.

I would say though that the Manchester machine, architecturally and in other ways, looks and feels to me much more like a modern computer than ENIAC.

[1] https://computerhistory.org/blog/programming-the-eniac-an-ex...

"Seventy five years ago, the University’s ‘Baby’ computer became the first electronic computer with a read/write memory to run a program." says the article.

The modified ENIAC used a kind of ROM for its program (a function table), so the addition "first....with a read/write memory" deals with that.

I’ve heard of university courses which are taught from original sources, ie teaching calculus from principia mathematica.

I’ve had a fantasy about the same approach for computer science: learn assembly on the Manchester baby, write a C compiler for the pdp-11, etc.

How realistic would the first bit be? Are there simulators and programming manuals for the Manchester baby?

I don't know much about the Baby, but wikipedia says it had 32 words of memory and 7 instructions. Surely that won't be hard to emulate but will be an absolute pain to use. No wonder it only ran three different programs. There's an emulator here: https://www.davidsharp.com/baby/

Shame this isn't implemented in Javascript as a webpage (its in Java), but that might be a nice project for someone!

https://www.davidsharp.com/publicsvn/baby/

There has been a programming competition for the Manchester Baby, producing some quite nice demos: http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/digital60/www.digital60....

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36479769

No discussion that time, sadly. I see you've posted some other interesting links that didn't get traction either - perhaps try submitting some of them again? There's a lot of luck in what does and doesn't make it onto the front page.

I greatly enjoyed "Geniuses at War", which describes the Colossus machines that were the immediate ancestors of the Manchester Computer.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Geniuses_at_War.html?id...

that is great - i love all those wires going all over the place. one of those things that almostly didn't work, but did.

Having studied at Manchester university this as a joy to read

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