Ferranti Mark 1

Abstract: The logical design of the 1948 Manchester Baby was virtually identical to a 1946 Princeton design. However, thanks to F.C. Williams' and Tom Kilburn's groundbreaking cathode ray tube (CRT) memory and their innovative engineering, the universal electronic digital computer made its world debut in Manchester. This article reassesses the place of Williams and Kilburn in the history of computing.

Abstract: This article documents the early experiments in both Australia and England to make a computer play music. The experiments in England with the Ferranti Mark 1 and the Pilot ACE (practically undocumented at the writing of this article) and those in Australia with CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) are the oldest known examples of using a computer to play music. Significantly, they occurred some six years before the experiments at Bell Labs in the USA. Furthermore, the computers played music in real time. These developments were important, and despite not directly leading to later highly significant developments such as those at Bell Labs under the direction of Max Mathews, these forward-thinking developments in England and Australia show a history of computing machines being used musically since the earliest development of those machines. 1

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the details of the structure and order code of the MARK I machine. The design of digital computers at Manchester started in late 1946 with the arrival of F. C. Williams and Tom Kilburn. The prototype MARK I was built in the Electrotechnical Laboratories. The Ferranti MARK I was a serial, fixed point binary computer with a CPU technology based on EF50 (CV 1091) and EF55 pentodes, and EA50 vacuum tube diodes. Central registers in the MARK I was in general implemented via Williams tubes rather than flip-flops, thus, achieving considerable economy. The order code of the Ferranti production machine was based on the order code for the Manchester University MARK I as it existed in October 1949. The first production MARK I was installed in February 1951 and finally dismantled in June 1959. Ferranti delivered nine MARK I or MARK I machines between 1951 and 1957.

Abstract: Among the first modern computers outside military applications such as ‘Colossus’ at Bletchley Park was EDSAC, built at Cambridge University. This became the basis for the first commercial computer, LEO 1 (or Lyons Electronic Office 1), developed for the JLyons and Co. bakery and restaurant chain (Ferry, 2003). Meanwhile at Manchester University, the Manchester Baby had evolved into the Manchester Mark 1 which became the basis for the Ferranti Mark 1. At this time computer software was provided and maintained free with the hardware as it would only run on the hardware for which it was written — a situation common until recently with in-car electronics and mobile ’phones. Though UK software development was to become largely a closed process, in the USA it remained largely open with much of the development of the Unix system software, first developed in AT&T’s labs, taking place in universities. These were required by US legislation relating to bodies in receipt of public funds to make their research publicly available. Initially, they did this by printing the code for the software in research papers but eventually the length of the code became too great to include in papers and they began publishing it separately as computer files. To comply with US legislation, they created permissive licences, that is, ones allowing users to modify and publish their changes to the code, of which the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and BSD (Berkeley Systems Department) licences are probably the most well-known. Because AT&T was virtually a monopoly communications company in the US, it had been barred from selling computing equipment but in 1983 it was broken up and released from this restriction. Once the ban was lifted, AT&T began charging people for Unix. This created problems for the universities whose contributions to Unix were now being sold, in apparent contravention of their legal obligations, and annoyance to many of the academics who had contributed to it. Over the next decade, there were numerous attempts to resolve this impasse including developing different versions of Unix based on the universities’ work, of which BSD