Kilburn, a scientific officer at the TRE, joined Williams in his research. Williams returned to the TRE and began to investigate the idea, realizing that the approach also could be used to store digital data, with just one CRT. Williams came up with the idea of using two CRTs, and storing the radar trace by passing it back and forth between the two. As part of his research, he traveled to Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., to learn about work being done to remove ground echoes from the radar traces on CRTs. He helped develop the “identification: friend or foe” system, which used radar pulses to distinguish Allied aircraft during the war.īecause of his expertise, in 1945 the TRE tasked Williams with editing and contributing content to a series of books on radar techniques. Williams had an impressive background in radar systems and electronics research. Williams, a radar pioneer who worked at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), in Malvern, England. One such researcher was British engineer F.C. The IEEE commemorated Baby as an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony held on 21 June at the university.Īfter World War II, research groups around the world began investigating ways to build computers that could perform multiple tasks from memory. “The Baby was very limited in what it could do, but it was the first-ever real-life demonstration of electronic stored-program computing, the fast and flexible approach used in nearly all computers today,” said James Sumner, a lecturer on the history of technology at the University of Manchester, in an interview with the Manchester Evening News. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill developed and built the machine and its storage system-the Williams-Kilburn tube-at the University of Manchester. The first electronic digital computer capable of storing instructions and data in a read/write memory was the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, known as the Manchester “Baby.” It successfully ran a program from memory in June 1948.Ĭomputing pioneers Frederic C. Until the late 1940s, every time a machine needed to change tasks, it had to be physically reprogrammed and rewired, according to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, England. Over the years, memory has been made up of vacuum tubes, glass tubes filled with mercury and, most recently, semiconductors.īut the first computers didn’t have any reprogrammable memory at all. Without random-access memory, a computer today can’t even boot up. Whether you’re streaming a movie on Netflix, playing a video game, or just looking at digital photos, your computer is regularly dipping into its memory for instructions.
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