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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?

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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/

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