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  • In about 1966 I asked Professor Kilburn, why is it

  • whenever I open a

  • computer science textbook I get the American origins of computers

  • but the Brits are nowhere?

  • So Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and said

  • those who need to know do know

  • What was special about the Baby was that such a computer

  • can be used for a wide variety, perhaps almost an infinite variety of problems

  • It was an engineering testbed

  • to test out the reliability of a memory invention

  • The central problem of the

  • computer was recognised to be the problem of storage and so the problem

  • was quite simply brought to my notice

  • Cathode ray tubes were used widely during the second world war for radar purposes

  • It's a way of displaying electronic signals on a screen that you can see

  • In a Williams and Kilburn storage tube

  • each little element

  • of the screen

  • was excited by the electrons and became charged

  • and each area of stored charge was made to represent a binary digit, a 1 or a 0

  • F.C. was a member of the telecommunication research establishment which was called TRE

  • At the end of the war he was offered a post at Manchester university

  • and he accepted with enthusiasm

  • and he took one of his chaps, Tom Kilburn and also asked for

  • other bright young men, so I was the next one

  • It was a very exciting time, there were

  • a very small number of people who worked together very closely indeed

  • Tom Kilburn

  • worked on

  • the CRT memory and in about a year he'd actually moved from one bit of storage

  • to one thousand to two thousand bits of storage

  • In December '47 what had arrived

  • was a memory which could show static pictures

  • now what we needed to check was that those pictures could actually

  • change, be recorded properly, and do that at electronic speeds. That's really why

  • the Baby was built

  • It consisted of 6 ft 6" high

  • post office racks, 23 inches wide

  • all round the laboratory

  • It was just a simple room

  • It had no air conditioning so we always had windows open and things

  • in those days, you know, to keep

  • the temperature sensible

  • This was the centre of Manchester and in with the fresh air came the dirt

  • Tom and I wore lab coats

  • a long coat down to your mid-thighs or knees

  • We avoided electric shocks by the classic artifice

  • of keeping one hand in your pocket all the time and never to touch anything with

  • both hands at once

  • We had a couple of technical staff who did did the actual building

  • One of the best wiremen we had

  • was Ida Fitzgerald I think was her surname

  • She delivered the chassis wired to our diagram

  • and we would look at it and say oh dear, I didn't mean to do that and we would

  • proceed to alter Ida's neat wiring

  • Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill had been struggling for some days

  • The machine kept failing, perhaps it was a wiring error or some soldered joint had failed

  • and then one day it all held together and worked not just once but twice but

  • three times and they realised

  • we've made it

  • Finally when we pressed the start button it

  • set off on this usual dance of death

  • and then suddenly it stopped

  • and there in the

  • expected line was the expected answer

  • so we'd built a computing machine

  • We went out to lunch in the canteen as usual, and we were actually having lunch

  • instead of having brought in sandwiches, that was the way we celebrated

  • What was needed now was to develop both the programming side

  • and the arithmetic side to develop this universal machine

  • The Baby was then expanded over the next 18 months to create

  • the Manchester University Mark 1 computer. It was made about

  • three times bigger, it had a lot more store and so on

  • By then, as far as the engineers were concerned, the Baby computer was old hat

  • There's nothing

  • left at all

  • of the Baby or the expanded Baby

  • In fact the racks that the Baby and the expanded Baby were built on were used

  • for the next machine that we built

  • In 1994

  • I realised that in four years time it would be the 50th anniversary

  • of the Baby computer. I put together a proposal as to how we could build a

  • replica of that original machine

  • Tom Kilburn and I both vetted it and approved it and

  • as we said to each other when we saw it, oh this is all wrong

  • of course, it's nice and clean

  • We completed the replica build and re-enacted

  • the running of the world's first program

  • They operated the switches, the program ran, they stood back, watched it on

  • the display tube, saw the answer was correct and then turned away and grinned

  • at the audience, as if to say there we can do it again

  • Normally the people who did the original work

  • tend to fade into obscurity

  • In England it's scientists and theoreticians who tend to get the glory

  • It's good that we remember the contribution of the electronic

  • engineers to the information age, to the second industrial revolution if you like

  • Manchester University now has a Tom Kilburn building

  • which in fact contains two laboratories known as the Tootill laboratories

  • Computers are everywhere today

  • in places unimaginable to the pioneers

  • The Baby started off with a thousand bits of storage and now there's so much

  • storage everywhere, you know

  • a million million million

  • amount of storage, that in my terms is science fiction

  • How do you foresee

  • the development of computers over the next decade?

  • I'm not really interested in computers, I made one

  • and I thought one out of one was a good score so I didn't make any more

In about 1966 I asked Professor Kilburn, why is it

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A2 初級 美國腔

曼徹斯特寶貝:世界上第一臺儲存程序的計算機。 (Manchester Baby: world's first stored program computer)

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    Jerry 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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