Oh Baby! First photograph of early modern computer

Run baby run!

clipped from www.physorg.com Here is the first known photograph of the great grandfather of modern digital computers – but you couldn’t use it on the train or take it jogging with you. The panoramic black and white image, which has been unearthed in the archives at The University of Manchester, shows a development version of ‘The Baby’ taking up a whole room with its towering Post Office racks and jumble of wiring. The Baby was built using metal Post Office racks, hundreds of valves or vacuum tubes and the keyboard was a series of push buttons and switches, mounted vertically. Instead of a screen, the output was read directly off the face of a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). In modern terms the prototype Baby had a RAM (random access memory) of just 32 locations or ‘words’. Each word in the RAM consisted of 32 bits (binary digits) and so The Baby had a grand total of 1024 bits of memory – and a computing speed of 1.2 milliseconds per instruction. For more information about Digital 60 please see http://www.digital60.org .