2009's major milestone for computing pioneers
Summary: Two historic British computers, the Manchester Mark 1 and Edsac, went live 60 years ago next year. Both systems were the immediate forerunners of the first commercial systems
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Manchester's computer scientists based their Mark 1 system on Williams tube memory — also known as the Williams-Kilburn tube — which uses residual charges on cathode ray tubes to store information. An electron gun scanned across the phosphor created a field of bright dots and dark spaces corresponding to ones and zeros, and if the image was rescanned before it faded then the current through the electron gun changed according to the pattern laid down before.
The tubes were invented by Tom Kilburn and Sir Frederic Williams, pictured above at the Manchester Mark 1 console.
These tubes could hold up to 2,048 bits of data and were faster than mercury delay-line storage, but wore out more quickly.
Among the scientists working on the Manchester Mark 1 project was mathematician Mary Lee Woods who later married fellow team member Conway Berners-Lee. Their son is web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Photograph © The University of Manchester 1998, 1999
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