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To: Tony Viola who wrote (43384)	12/30/1997 2:02:00 PM
From: Joey Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

OFF TOPIC. Thought some of you on the thread might be interested in this article on the world's 1st programmable computer: joey World's Oldest Computer Comes Back To Life (12/30/97; 12:48 p.m. EST) By Douglas Hayward, TechWeb Programmers from around the world are being invited to compete for the honor of writing code for what's said to be the world's first software-driven computer. The nearly-50-year-old computer, nicknamed Baby, is said to be the first machine to store and run written programs. The story began on June 21, 1948, when Tom Kilburn ran a 17-instruction program on Baby, a 1-ton mass of wires and vacuum tubes occupying an entire room in Manchester, England. Kilburn's program, which calculated the highest factor of 2 to the power of 18, was the first to run on a fully automated computer. Although computers such as the British Colossus and the American Eniac had already been built, Baby did not rely on machine operators to flick a series of plugs and switches for it to run. Baby was hardly a model of sleek design -- it was 16 feet long, seven feet high, and two feet deep. It contained a sprawling mass of electrical wires and 600 vacuum tubes. Still, it had 1,024 bits of memory and could calculate seven instruction types. Today, the British Computer Conservation Society, a group dedicated to preserving and reconstructing historically important computer machinery, has posted a simulator on the Web that lets users try their hand at programming Baby. Anyone interested in programming Baby can download the simulator from the Computer Conservation Society's Website, where details of the competition have also been posted. Because Baby was built before programming languages --- let alone transistors -- were invented, entrants don't have to be professional programmers. The winning entry will be selected by the original Baby's two designers, Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams, and will run on the reconstructed Baby at exactly 11:15 in the morning -- just like Kilburn's original program. The reconstruction is paid for by ICL, the British computer company that traces its roots back to that room in Manchester where Baby was born. The original Baby was taken apart after Williams began work on its successor, the Ferranti Mark 1, the commercial machine from which ICL's mainframes ultimately descended. "Baby's users didn't realize they were working on a machine that was historically important," said Tom Hinchliffe, the former director of ICL's mainframes business who is helping run the project. "It wasn't neat and tidy. In fact, it looked a bit like a rat's nest. It wasn't something they would have wanted to hang onto." Reconstructing Baby hasn't been easy for Hinchliffe and his colleagues -- mostly former ICL staff members. To make Baby as authentic as possible, obscure circuitry and components had to be traced from some odd sources. In one case, the volunteers had to dig up a garden to retrieve a mounting rack that was being used to prevent the garden crumbling into a river. Only the electricity supply has been changed, for safety reasons. The reconstructed Baby won't suffer the dismemberment that befell its original version, however. It has already been accepted as a permanent exhibit in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester -- itself appropriately based in the world' first railway station.