The LEO was a series of early computer systems created by J. Lyons and Co. The first in the series, the LEO I, was the first computer used for commercial business applications.
The General Electric Company (GEC) was a major British industrial conglomerate involved in consumer and defence electronics, communications, and engineering.
International Computers Limited (ICL) was a British computer hardware, computer software and computer services company that operated from 1968 until 2002. It was formed through a merger of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), English Electric Computers (EEC) and Elliott Automation in 1968. The company's most successful product line was the ICL 2900 Series range of mainframe computers.
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.
Ferranti or Ferranti International PLC was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The Marconi Company was a British telecommunications and engineering company that did business under that name from 1963 to 1987. Its roots were in the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company founded by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1897, which underwent several changes in name after mergers and acquisitions. The company was a pioneer of wireless long distance communication and mass media broadcasting, eventually becoming one of the UK's most successful manufacturing companies. In 1999, its defence equipment manufacturing division, Marconi Electronic Systems, merged with British Aerospace (BAe) to form BAE Systems. In 2006, financial difficulties led to the collapse of the remaining company, with the bulk of the business acquired by the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson.
Pegasus was an early British vacuum-tube (valve) computer built by Ferranti, Ltd that pioneered design features to make life easier for both engineers and programmers. Originally it was 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 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).
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. It exported computers to many countries and in 1968 became part of International Computers Limited (ICL).
Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd was an early computer company of the 1950s and 1960s in the United Kingdom. It traced its descent from a firm of instrument makers founded by William Elliott in London around 1804. The research laboratories were originally set up in 1946 at Borehamwood and the first Elliott 152 computer appeared in 1950.
The Computer Conservation Society (CCS) is a British organisation, founded in 1989. It is under the joint umbrella of the British Computer Society (BCS), the London Science Museum and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.
Conway Maurice Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked as a member of the team that developed the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial stored program electronic computer. He was born in Birmingham in 1921 and was the father of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Professor Mike Berners-Lee, researcher into climate change.
The FP-6000 was a second-generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard, the Canadian division of Ferranti, in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so. Only six FP-6000s were sold before the computer division of Ferranti-Packard was sold off by Ferranti's UK headquarters in 1963, the FP-6000 becoming the basis for the mid-range machines of the ICT 1900, which sold into the thousands in Europe.
The Orion was a mid-range mainframe computer introduced by Ferranti in 1959 and installed for the first time in 1961. Ferranti positioned Orion to be their primary offering during the early 1960s, complementing their high-end Atlas and smaller systems like the Sirius and Argus. The Orion was based on a new type of logic circuit known as "Neuron" and included built-in multitasking support, one of the earliest commercial machines to do so.
The GEC Series 63 was a 32-bit minicomputer produced by GEC Computers Limited of the UK during the 1980s in conjunction with A. B. Dick in USA. During development, the computer was known as the R Project. The hardware development was done in Scottsdale, Arizona whilst the software was the responsibility of GEC in Dunstable, UK. The hardware made early use of pipeline concepts, processing one instruction whilst completing the preceding one.
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.
GEC Computers Limited was a British computer manufacturing company under the GEC holding company from 1968 until the 1990s.
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.
ICT 1900 was a family of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and later International Computers Limited (ICL) during the 1960s and 1970s. The 1900 series was notable for being one of the few non-American competitors to the IBM System/360, enjoying significant success in the European and British Commonwealth markets.
George Eric Felton was a British computer scientist. He undertook pioneering work in the field of operating systems and programming software and is the father of the GEORGE Operating System. He held the world record for the computation of π.
