Geoff Tootill
Scientist who helped create the first modern computer, ‘Baby’
GEOFF TOOTILL, the computer scientist who has died aged 95, was a key member of the team which developed the “Baby”, the world’s first programmable computer, at Manchester University in 1948.
Officially known as the Small-scale Experimental Machine or SSEM, “Baby”, as it was later nicknamed, marked the birth of modern computing when it became the first computer in the world to run a program electronically stored in its memory, as opposed to hard-wired in or on paper tape.
Its genesis came during the war when Tootill worked with FC “Freddie” Williams and Tom Kilburn on development of airborne radar at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) at Malvern, where Williams, the most senior of the three, had been experimenting with methods of storing radar data on a cathode ray tube (CRT).
After the war, when Williams was appointed head of electro-technics at Manchester University, he recruited Tootill and Kilburn to build a machine that could prove that CRT could be used to store data. Tootill brought to the team not only his experience from working at the TRE but also his work automating stage lighting for the establishment’s wartime concert party, the Flying Rockets. This was done using Post Office relays driven by binary numbers, of which, at the time, few people had any experience.
After agreeing on the design for the basic unit of the SSEM, they drew up a theoretical circuit diagram, which was then created by an expert in electronic wiring. “I do not think I ever had to work as hard as I did then,” Tootill recalled. On June 21 1948 the machine ran successfully for the first time, taking 52 minutes to find the highest proper factor of 2 to the power of 18, a process which involved approximately 3.5 million arithmetic operations.
The Baby was the first computer with a Random Access Memory; it had a RAM of about 128 bytes. Today’s machines have a RAM of several gigabytes.
Asked years later what they did to celebrate the occasion, Tootill said simply: “We went to lunch in the canteen as usual and probably discussed what we were going to do next.”
Geoffrey Colin Tootill was born on March 4 1922 at Chadderton, Lancashire, to Alice and Fred Tootill, editor of the Cooperative News. Geoff grew up at Bournville, Birmingham, where he won a Classics scholarship to King Edward’s School, Birmingham.
During his teenage years he built a radio with a sleep timer using an alarm clock to switch it off after he went to sleep.
Awarded a scholarship to read Maths at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he graduated after two years when his studies were cut short by the war. In 1943 he worked on the installation and development of airborne radar at the TRE, before joining Williams and Kilburn in Manchester.
In 1949 he moved to Ferranti to work on the logic design of the Ferranti Mark 1 Computer, the world’s first commercially produced computer. He then went on to teach computing at the Royal Military College of Science, and developed computer systems for a number of organisations including RAE Farnborough, the European Space Research Organisation and the National Physical Laboratory.
He was a founder member, in 1956, of the British Computer Society.
Geoff Tootill retired in 1982. In 1998 the Computer Conservation Society built a replica of the Baby – based largely on his notes and recollections – at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. A page from his June 1948 notebook details the code of the first ever software program, written by Tom Kilburn.
He married Pamela Watson in 1947. She died in 1979. In 1981 he married Joyce Turnbull. She survives him with three sons from his first marriage.
Geoff Tootill, born March 4 1922, died October 26 2017