Manchester Mark 1

Manchester Mark I, also called Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM, was a British tube computer, which was constructed at the University of Manchester 1948/49.

History

The "father" of modern computers, Alan Turing, taught at the University of Manchester. In 1948, his ideas from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the first based on the Von Neumann architecture computer. This was the prototype of the Manchester Mark I, which was still designed by Frederic Calland Williams and Tom Kilburn at Manchester University. For data storage, a drum memory was used as a storage medium for programs called Williams tubes were used, which proved to be extremely maintenance-intensive and sensitive. Nevertheless, Tom Kilburn was able to demonstrate the operation of the machine: he wrote on 21 June 1948 a first 17- line program to calculate the highest factor of a number.

The British company Ferranti Ferranti Mark I developed the computer, which was the second commercially available general purpose computer after the Zuse Z4 From the Manchester Mark I. It was first delivered in February 1951, shortly before the UNIVAC I.

Trivia

On the development of the Manchester among others, a mathematician couple was involved, whose son Tim Berners -Lee invented the World Wide Web later.