Also known as | Manchester Electronic Computer Manchester Ferranti |
---|---|
Product family | Manchester computers |
Predecessor | Manchester Mark 1 |
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, [1] and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd. It was the world's first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored program digital computer. [a]
Although preceded as a commercial digital computer by the BINAC and the Z4, the Z4 was electromechanical and lacked software programmability, while BINAC never operated successfully after delivery. [2]
The Ferranti Mark 1 was "the tidied up and commercialised version of the Manchester Mark I". [3] The first machine was delivered to the Victoria University of Manchester in February 1951 [4] (publicly demonstrated in July) [5] [6] ahead of the UNIVAC I which was delivered to the United States Census Bureau in late December 1952, having been sold on 31 March 1951. [7]
Based on the Manchester Mark 1, [3] [8] which was designed at the University of Manchester by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, the machine was built by Ferranti of the United Kingdom. The main improvements over it were in the size of the primary and secondary storage, a faster multiplier, and additional instructions.
The Mark 1 used a 20-bit word stored as a single line of dots of electric charges settled on the surface of a Williams tube display, each cathodic tube storing 64 lines of dots. Instructions were stored in a single word, while numbers were stored in two words. The main memory consisted of eight tubes, each storing one such page of 64 words. Other tubes stored the single 80-bit accumulator (A), the 40-bit "multiplicand/quotient register" (MQ) and eight "B-lines", or index registers, which was one of the unique features of the Mark 1 design. The accumulator could also be addressed as two 40-bit words. An extra 20-bit word per tube stored an offset value into the secondary storage. Secondary storage was provided in the form of a 512-page magnetic drum, storing two pages per track, with about 30 milliseconds revolution time. The drum provided eight times the storage of the original designed at Manchester.
The instructions, like the Manchester machine, used a single-address format in which operands were modified and left in the accumulator. There were about fifty instructions in total. The basic cycle time was 1.2 milliseconds, and a multiplication could be completed in the new parallel unit in about 2.16 milliseconds (about 5 times faster than the original). The multiplier used almost a quarter of the machine's 4,050 vacuum tubes. [1] Several instructions were included to copy a word of memory from one of the Williams tubes to a paper tape machine, or read them back in. Several new instructions were added to the original Manchester design, including a random number instruction and several new instructions using the B-lines.
The original Mark 1 had to be programmed by entering alphanumeric characters representing a five-bit value that could be represented on the paper tape input. The engineers decided to use the simplest mapping between the paper holes and the binary digits they represented, but the mapping between the holes and the physical keyboard was never meant to be a binary mapping. As a result, the characters representing the values from 0–31 (five-bit numbers) looked entirely random, specifically /E@A:SIU½DRJNFCKTZLWHYPQOBG"MXV£
.
The first machine was delivered to the University of Manchester. Ferranti had high hopes for further sales, and were encouraged by an order placed by the Atomic Energy Research Establishment for delivery in autumn 1952. However, a change of government while the second machine was being built led to all government contracts over £100,000 being cancelled, leaving Ferranti with a partially completed Mark 1. The company ultimately sold it to the University of Toronto, [9] who had been building their own machine, but saw the chance to buy the complete Mark 1 for even less. They purchased it for around $30,000, a "fire sale" price, and Beatrice Worsley gave it the nickname FERUT. [10] FERUT was extensively used in business, engineering, and academia, among other duties, carrying out calculations as part of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Alan Turing wrote a programming manual. [11]
After the first two machines, a revised version of the design became available, known as the Ferranti Mark 1 Star or the Ferranti Mark 1*. The revisions mainly cleaned up the instruction set for better usability. Instead of the original mapping from holes to binary digits that resulted in the random-looking mapping, the new machines mapped digits to holes to produce a much simpler mapping, ø£½0@:$ABCDEFGHIJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ
. Additionally, several commands that used the index registers had side effects that led to quirky programming, but these were modified to have no side effects. The original machines' JUMP
instructions landed at a location "one before" the actual address, for reasons similar to the odd index behaviour, but these proved useful only in theory and quite annoying in practice, and were similarly modified. Input/output was also modified, with five-bit numbers being output least significant digit to the right, as is typical for most numeric writing. These, among other changes, greatly improved the ease of programming the newer machines.
The Mark 1/1* weighed 10,000 pounds (5.0 short tons; 4.5 t). [12]
At least seven of the Mark 1* machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, [9] one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam. [13] Another was installed at Avro, the aircraft manufacturers, at their Chadderton factory in Manchester. This was used for work on the Vulcan among other projects.
Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, the parents of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, both worked on the Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1*. [14]
Included in the Ferranti Mark 1's instruction set was a hoot command, which enabled the machine to give auditory feedback to its operators. The sound generated could be altered in pitch, a feature which was exploited when the Mark 1 made the earliest known recording of computer-generated music, playing a medley which included "God Save the King", "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and "In the Mood". [15] The recording was made by the BBC towards the end of 1951, with the programming being done by Christopher Strachey, a mathematics teacher at Harrow and a friend of Alan Turing. It was not, however, the first computer to have played music; CSIRAC, Australia's first digital computer, achieved that with a rendition of "Colonel Bogey". [16]
In November 1951, Dr. Dietrich Prinz wrote one of the earliest computer games, a chess-playing program for the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1 computer. The limitation of the Mark 1 computer did not allow for a whole game of chess to be programmed. Prinz could only program mate-in-two chess problems. The program examined every possible move for White and Black (thousands of possible moves) until a solution was found, which took 15–20 minutes for easy problems but several hours in general. [17] The program's restrictions were: no castling, no double pawn move, no en passant capture, [18] no pawn promotion, nevertheless it distincted between checkmate and stalemate. [17]
The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the second electronic digital stored-program computer, after the Manchester Mark 1, to go into regular service.
The history of computing hardware spans the developments from early devices used for simple calculations to today's complex computers, encompassing advancements in both analog and digital technology.
The Williams tube, or the Williams–Kilburn tube named after inventors Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, is an early form of computer memory. It was the first random-access digital storage device, and was used successfully in several early computers.
BINAC is an early electronic computer that was designed for Northrop Aircraft Company by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) in 1949. Eckert and Mauchly had started the design of EDVAC at the University of Pennsylvania, but chose to leave and start EMCC, the first computer company. BINAC was their first product, the first stored-program computer in the United States; BINAC is also sometimes claimed to be the world's first commercial digital computer even though it was limited in scope and never fully functional after delivery.
A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically, electromagnetically, or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms.
The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, written by John von Neumann in 1945, describing designs discussed with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with these components:
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.
The Pilot ACE was one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom. Built at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the early 1950s, it was also one of the earliest general-purpose, stored-program computers – joining other UK designs like the Manchester Mark 1 and EDSAC of the same era. It was a preliminary version of the full ACE, which was designed by Alan Turing, who left NPL before the construction was completed.
Tom Kilburn was an English mathematician and computer scientist. Over his 30-year career, he was involved in the development of five computers of great historical significance. With Freddie Williams he worked on the Williams–Kilburn tube and the world's first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby, while working at the University of Manchester. His work propelled Manchester and Britain into the forefront of the emerging field of computer science.
The Mercury was an early commercial computer from the mid-1950s built by Ferranti. It was the successor to the Ferranti Mark 1, adding a floating point unit for improved performance, and increased reliability by replacing the Williams tube memory with core memory and using more solid-state components. The computer had roughly 2000 vacuum tubes and 2000 germanium diodes. Nineteen Mercuries were sold before Ferranti moved on to newer designs.
Pegasus was an early British vacuum-tube (valve) computer built by Ferranti Ltd that pioneered design features to improve usability for both engineers and programmers. It was originally named the Ferranti Package Computer as its hardware design followed that of the Elliott 401 with modular plug-in packages. Much of the development was the product of three men: W. S. (Bill) Elliott (hardware), Christopher Strachey (software) and Bernard Swann. It was Ferranti's most popular valve computer with 38 units being sold. The first Pegasus was delivered in 1956 and the last was delivered in 1959. Ferranti received funding for the development from the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC).
Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.
The Atlas was one of the world's first supercomputers, in use from 1962 to 1972. Atlas's capacity promoted the saying that when it went offline, half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. It is notable for being the first machine with virtual memory using paging techniques; this approach quickly spread, and is now ubiquitous.
The Manchester computers were an innovative series of stored-program electronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the University of Manchester, under the leadership of Tom Kilburn. They included the world's first stored-program computer, the world's first transistorised computer, and what was the world's fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962.
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby. Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949.
Ferranti's Sirius was a minicomputer released in 1961. Designed to be used in smaller offices without a dedicated programming staff, the Sirius used decimal arithmetic instead of binary, supported Autocode to ease programming, was designed to fit behind a standard office desk, and ran on UK standard mains electricity with no need for cooling. It was also fairly slow, with instruction speeds around 4,000 operations per second, and had limited main memory based on delay lines, but as Ferranti pointed out, its price/performance ratio was difficult to beat.
Beatrice Helen Worsley was a Canadian computer scientist, the first woman in the country to work in that profession. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as computer science. She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.
Dietrich Gunther Prinz was a computer science pioneer, notable for his work on early British computers at Ferranti, and in particular for developing the first limited chess program in 1951.
Turochamp is a chess program developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948. It was created as part of research by the pair into computer science and machine learning. Turochamp is capable of playing an entire chess game against a human player at a low level of play by calculating all potential moves and all potential player moves in response, as well as some further moves it deems considerable. It then assigns point values to each game state, and selects the move resulting in the highest point value.
Margery Audrey Bates (Clayton Wallis) (1928–2014) was a British-American computer programmer who, in 1948, wrote the earliest program for lambda calculus calculations on the Manchester Mark I computer.