The day ‘Baby’ got right answer

HISTORY was made on June 21, 1948 in Manchester.

“A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong.

“But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer.

“It was a moment to remember. Nothing was ever the same again.”

That was how Professor Freddie Williams remembered the epochmaking moment when a computer had been built that could hold a user program digitally in an electronic memory and process it at electronic speeds.

And the team that built it was led by Yorkshireman Tom Kilburn, from Dewsbury.

That first computer was affectionately known as ‘Baby’.

It was the first machine that had all the components now regarded as characteristic of a basic digital computer.

Among the first to recognise its importance was Alan Turing, the legendary Bletchley Park code-breaker.

Surprisingly, the man who played such a vital role in the evolution of computers never owned one himself, yet Tom Kilburn’s fingerprints are undeniably on every computer in the world.

He died in 2001, aged 79.