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71-530: The Manchester computers were an innovative series of stored-program electronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the University of Manchester , under the leadership of Tom Kilburn . They included the world's first stored-program computer , the world's first transistorised computer, and what was the world's fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962. The project began with two aims: to prove

142-663: A time-sharing operating system developed by Cambridge Computer Laboratory . The University of Manchester's Atlas was decommissioned in 1971, but the last was in service until 1974. Parts of the Chilton Atlas are preserved by the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. In June 2022 an IEEE Milestone was dedicated to the "Atlas Computer and the Invention of Virtual Memory 1957–1962". The Manchester MU5

213-589: A 20-bit address and four to make a 40-bit integer. This was a result of the physical properties of the Williams tubes, which were used to make eight B-lines , or in modern terminology, accumulator / index registers . Meg could multiply two integers in about 60 microseconds. The floating-point unit used three words for a 30-bit mantissa, and another as a 10-bit exponent. It could add two floating-point numbers in about 180 microseconds, and multiply them in about 360 microseconds. Ferranti, which had built

284-519: A data operation cannot occur at the same time (since they share a common bus ). This is referred to as the von Neumann bottleneck , which often limits the performance of the corresponding system. The von Neumann architecture is simpler than the Harvard architecture (which has one dedicated set of address and data buses for reading and writing to memory and another set of address and data buses to fetch instructions ). A stored-program computer uses

355-525: A description titled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC based on the work of Eckert and Mauchly. It was unfinished when his colleague Herman Goldstine circulated it, and bore only von Neumann's name (to the consternation of Eckert and Mauchly). The paper was read by dozens of von Neumann's colleagues in America and Europe, and influenced the next round of computer designs. Jack Copeland considers that it

426-502: A design architecture for an electronic digital computer with these components: The attribution of the invention of the architecture to von Neumann is controversial, not least because Eckert and Mauchly had done a lot of the required design work and claim to have had the idea for stored programs long before discussing the ideas with von Neumann and Herman Goldstine The term "von Neumann architecture" has evolved to refer to any stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and

497-529: A design very similar to the Mark I but replacing valves used as diodes with solid-state diodes. These were much less expensive than transistors, yet enough of them were used in the design that replacing just the diodes would still result in a significant simplification and improvement in reliability. At that time computers were used almost always in the sciences, and they decided to add a floating-point unit to greatly improve performance in this role. Additionally

568-506: A desk calculator (in principle) is a fixed program computer. It can do basic mathematics , but it cannot run a word processor or games. Changing the program of a fixed-program machine requires rewiring, restructuring, or redesigning the machine. The earliest computers were not so much "programmed" as "designed" for a particular task. "Reprogramming"—when possible at all—was a laborious process that started with flowcharts and paper notes, followed by detailed engineering designs, and then

639-405: A facility was the need for a program to increment or otherwise modify the address portion of instructions, which operators had to do manually in early designs. This became less important when index registers and indirect addressing became usual features of machine architecture. Another use was to embed frequently used data in the instruction stream using immediate addressing . On a large scale,

710-607: A machine he called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) . He presented this to the executive committee of the British National Physical Laboratory on February 19, 1946. Although Turing knew from his wartime experience at Bletchley Park that what he proposed was feasible, the secrecy surrounding Colossus , that was subsequently maintained for several decades, prevented him from saying so. Various successful implementations of

781-590: A machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves, which became known as the Manchester TC. Initially the only devices available were germanium point-contact transistors ; these were less reliable than the valves they replaced but consumed far less power. Two versions of the machine were produced. The first was the world's first transistorised computer, a prototype, and became operational on 16 November 1953. "The 48-bit machine used 92 point-contact transistors and 550 diodes". The second version

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852-677: A machine was the development of suitable memory with instantaneously accessible contents. At first they suggested using a special vacuum tube —called the " Selectron "—which the Princeton Laboratories of RCA had invented. These tubes were expensive and difficult to make, so von Neumann subsequently decided to build a machine based on the Williams memory . This machine—completed in June, 1952 in Princeton—has become popularly known as

923-466: A major influence. Modern functional programming and object-oriented programming are much less geared towards "pushing vast numbers of words back and forth" than earlier languages like FORTRAN were, but internally, that is still what computers spend much of their time doing, even highly parallel supercomputers. As of 1996, a database benchmark study found that three out of four CPU cycles were spent waiting for memory. Researchers expect that increasing

994-419: A malfunctioning program can damage itself, other programs, or the operating system , possibly leading to a computer crash . However, this problem also applies to conventional programs that lack bounds checking . Memory protection and various access controls generally safeguard against both accidental and malicious program changes. Ferranti Mercury When the Mark I started running in 1951, reliability

1065-420: A modular system with lower cost . This is sometimes called a "streamlining" of the architecture. In subsequent decades, simple microcontrollers would sometimes omit features of the model to lower cost and size. Larger computers added features for higher performance. The use of the same bus to fetch instructions and data leads to the von Neumann bottleneck , the limited throughput (data transfer rate) between

1136-619: A more realistic computing facility. In October 1948 UK Government Chief Scientist Ben Lockspeiser was given a demonstration of the prototype, and was so impressed that he immediately initiated a government contract with the local firm of Ferranti to make a commercial version of the machine, the Ferranti Mark 1 . Two versions of the Manchester Mark 1 were produced, the first of which, the Intermediary Version,

1207-523: A much smaller and more cost-effective system built entirely with transistors . It first ran in November 1953 and is believed to be the first entirely transistor-based computer. Metropolitan-Vickers later built this commercially as the Metrovick 950 , delivering seven. At the time, transistors were very expensive, compared to tubes. Another team, including the main designers of the Mark I, started with

1278-494: A personal computer, MU6-G, a high performance machine for general or scientific applications and MU6V, a parallel vector processing system. A prototype model of MU6V, based on 68000 microprocessors with vector orders emulated as "extracodes" was constructed and tested but not further developed beyond this. MU6-G was built with a grant from SRC and successfully ran as a service machine in the Department between 1982 and 1987, using

1349-573: A power consumption of 3.5 kilowatts. Its successful operation was reported in a letter to the journal Nature published in September 1948, establishing it as the world's first stored-program computer. It quickly evolved into a more practical machine, the Manchester Mark 1 . Development of the Manchester Mark 1 began in August 1948, with the initial aim of providing the university with

1420-451: A result of experience gained from the Mark 1, the developers concluded that computers would be used more in scientific roles than pure maths. They therefore embarked on the design of a new machine which would include a floating-point unit ; work began in 1951. The resulting machine, which ran its first program in May 1954, was known as Meg, or the megacycle machine. It was smaller and simpler than

1491-436: A test program, some dates are the first time the computer was demonstrated or completed, and some dates are for the first delivery or installation. Through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s computers generally became both smaller and faster, which led to evolutions in their architecture. For example, memory-mapped I/O lets input and output devices be treated the same as memory. A single system bus could be used to provide

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1562-455: Is "historically inappropriate to refer to electronic stored-program digital computers as 'von Neumann machines ' ". His Los Alamos colleague Stan Frankel said of von Neumann's regard for Turing's ideas I know that in or about 1943 or '44 von Neumann was well aware of the fundamental importance of Turing's paper of 1936.... Von Neumann introduced me to that paper and at his urging I studied it with care. Many people have acclaimed von Neumann as

1633-476: Is a prefix in the SI and other systems of units denoting a factor of 10 (one millionth). At the end of 1958 Ferranti agreed to collaborate with Manchester University on the project, and the computer was shortly afterwards renamed Atlas, with the joint venture under the control of Tom Kilburn. The first Atlas was officially commissioned on 7 December 1962, and was considered at that time to be the most powerful computer in

1704-648: Is based on spiking neural networks , useful in simulating the human brain (see Human Brain Project ). Von Neumann architecture The von Neumann architecture —also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture —is a computer architecture based on the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC , written by John von Neumann in 1945, describing designs discussed with John Mauchly , J. Presper Eckert at University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering . The document describes

1775-582: The 2900 series . ICL's 2980 in particular, first delivered in June 1975, owed a great deal to the design of MU5. MU5 remained in operation at the University until 1982. A fuller article about MU5 can be found on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. Once MU5 was fully operational, a new project was initiated to produce its successor, MU6. MU6 was intended to be a range of processors: MU6P, an advanced microprocessor architecture intended for use as

1846-625: The Atlas Supervisor , "considered by many to be the first recognisable modern operating system". Two other machines were built: one for a joint British Petroleum / University of London consortium, and the other for the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton near Oxford . A derivative system was built by Ferranti for Cambridge University , called the Titan or Atlas 2, which had a different memory organisation, and ran

1917-632: The ENIAC at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania , wrote about the stored-program concept in December 1943. In planning a new machine, EDVAC , Eckert wrote in January 1944 that they would store data and programs in a new addressable memory device, a mercury metal delay-line memory . This was the first time the construction of a practical stored-program machine

1988-466: The Java virtual machine , or languages embedded in web browsers ). On a smaller scale, some repetitive operations such as BITBLT or pixel and vertex shaders can be accelerated on general purpose processors with just-in-time compilation techniques. This is one use of self-modifying code that has remained popular. The mathematician Alan Turing , who had been alerted to a problem of mathematical logic by

2059-466: The Manchester Mark 1 developed from it, quickly attracted the attention of the United Kingdom government, who contracted the electrical engineering firm of Ferranti to produce a commercial version. The resulting machine, the Ferranti Mark 1 , was the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. The collaboration with Ferranti eventually led to an industrial partnership with

2130-508: The Science Research Council (SRC) awarded Manchester University a five-year grant of £630,466 (equivalent to £12 million in 2023) to develop the machine and ICT , later to become ICL , made its production facilities available to the University. In that year a group of 20 people was involved in the design: 11 Department of Computer Science staff, 5 seconded ICT staff and 4 SRC supported staff. The peak level of staffing

2201-558: The central processing unit (CPU) and memory compared to the amount of memory. Because the single bus can only access one of the two classes of memory at a time, throughput is lower than the rate at which the CPU can work. This seriously limits the effective processing speed when the CPU is required to perform minimal processing on large amounts of data. The CPU is continually forced to wait for needed data to move to or from memory. Since CPU speed and memory size have increased much faster than

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2272-487: The " reduction to practice " of these concepts but I would not regard these as comparable in importance with the introduction and explication of the concept of a computer able to store in its memory its program of activities and of modifying that program in the course of these activities. At the time that the "First Draft" report was circulated, Turing was producing a report entitled Proposed Electronic Calculator . It described in engineering and programming detail, his idea of

2343-404: The "father of the computer" (in a modern sense of the term) but I am sure that he would never have made that mistake himself. He might well be called the midwife, perhaps, but he firmly emphasized to me, and to others I am sure, that the fundamental conception is owing to Turing—in so far as not anticipated by Babbage.... Both Turing and von Neumann, of course, also made substantial contributions to

2414-514: The ACE design were produced. Both von Neumann's and Turing's papers described stored-program computers, but von Neumann's earlier paper achieved greater circulation and the computer architecture it outlined became known as the "von Neumann architecture". In the 1953 publication Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines (edited by B. V. Bowden), a section in the chapter on Computers in America reads as follows: The Machine of

2485-676: The Automatic Computing Engine, but although comparatively small in bulk and containing only about 800 thermionic valves, as can be judged from Plates XII, XIII and XIV, it is an extremely rapid and versatile calculating machine. The basic concepts and abstract principles of computation by a machine were formulated by Dr. A. M. Turing, F.R.S., in a paper . read before the London Mathematical Society in 1936, but work on such machines in Britain

2556-726: The Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton In 1945, Professor J. von Neumann, who was then working at the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia, where the E.N.I.A.C. had been built, issued on behalf of a group of his co-workers, a report on the logical design of digital computers. The report contained a detailed proposal for the design of the machine that has since become known as the E.D.V.A.C. (electronic discrete variable automatic computer). This machine has only recently been completed in America, but

2627-600: The MUSS operating system developed as part of the MU5 project. SpiNNaker: Spiking Neural Network Architecture is a massively parallel , manycore supercomputer architecture designed by Steve Furber in the University of Manchester's Advanced Processor Technologies Research Group (APT). Built in 2019, it is composed of 57,600 ARM9 processors (specifically ARM968), each with 18 cores and 128 MB of mobile DDR SDRAM , totalling 1,036,800 cores and over 7 TB of RAM. The computing platform

2698-571: The Maniac. The design of this machine inspired at least half a dozen machines now being built in America, all known affectionately as "Johniacs". In the same book, the first two paragraphs of a chapter on ACE read as follows: Automatic Computation at the National Physical Laboratory One of the most modern digital computers which embodies developments and improvements in the technique of automatic electronic computing

2769-498: The Mark 1, as well as quicker at solving maths problems. Ferranti produced a commercial version marketed as the Ferranti Mercury , in which the Williams tubes were replaced by the more reliable core memory . Work on building a smaller and cheaper computer began in 1952, in parallel with Meg's ongoing development. Two of Kilburn's team, Richard Grimsdale and D. C. Webb, were assigned to the task of designing and building

2840-520: The Mark I for the university, continued development of the prototype Meg to produce the Mercury. The main change was to replace the Williams tubes with core memory. Although slower to access, at about 10 μs for a 10-bit short word, the system required virtually no maintenance, considerably more important for commercial users. 1024×40-bits of core were provided, backed by four drums each holding 4096×40-bits. The first of an eventual 19 Mercury computers

2911-507: The Von Neumann performance bottleneck. For example, the following all can improve performance : The problem can also be sidestepped somewhat by using parallel computing , using for example the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture—this approach is commonly employed by supercomputers . It is less clear whether the intellectual bottleneck that Backus criticized has changed much since 1977. Backus's proposed solution has not had

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2982-588: The ability to treat instructions as data is what makes assemblers , compilers , linkers , loaders , and other automated programming tools possible. It makes "programs that write programs" possible. This has made a sophisticated self-hosting computing ecosystem flourish around von Neumann architecture machines. Some high-level languages leverage the von Neumann architecture by providing an abstract, machine-independent way to manipulate executable code at runtime (e.g., LISP ), or by using runtime information to tune just-in-time compilation (e.g. languages hosted on

3053-417: The compiled code. It was structured as a small kernel that implemented an arbitrary set of virtual machines analogous to a corresponding set of processors. The MUSS code appeared in the common segments that formed part of each virtual machine's virtual address space. MU5 was fully operational by October 1974, coinciding with ICL's announcement that it was working on the development of a new range of computers,

3124-470: The computer company ICL , who made use of many of the ideas developed at the university, particularly in the design of their 2900 series of computers during the 1970s. The Manchester Baby was designed as a test-bed for the Williams tube , an early form of computer memory, rather than as a practical computer. Work on the machine began in 1947, and on 21 June 1948 the computer successfully ran its first program, consisting of 17 instructions written to find

3195-420: The first completed in 1956. They were successfully deployed within various departments of the company and were in use for about five years. Development of MUSE – a name derived from " microsecond engine" – began at the university in 1956. The aim was to build a computer that could operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, one million instructions per second. Mu (or μ )

3266-455: The hardware on the nature of operands, so as to allow them to be optimally buffered. Thus named variables were buffered separately from array elements, which were themselves accessed by means of named descriptors. Each descriptor included an array length which could be used in string processing instructions or to enable array bound checking to be carried out by hardware. The instruction pre-fetching mechanism used an associative jump trace to predict

3337-413: The highest proper factor of 2 (262,144) by trying every integer from 2 − 1 downwards. The program ran for 52 minutes before producing the correct answer of 2 (131,072). The Baby was 17 feet (5.2 m) in length, 7 feet 4 inches (2.24 m) tall, and weighed almost 1  long ton . It contained 550  thermionic valves  – 300  diodes and 250  pentodes  – and had

3408-573: The latter became the Electronics Section of the Laboratory, under the charge of Mr. F. M. Colebrook. The First Draft described a design that was used by many universities and corporations to construct their computers. Among these various computers, only ILLIAC and ORDVAC had compatible instruction sets. The date information in the following chronology is difficult to put into proper order. Some dates are for first running

3479-689: The lectures of Max Newman at the University of Cambridge , wrote a paper in 1936 entitled On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem , which was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society . In it he described a hypothetical machine he called a universal computing machine , now known as the " Universal Turing machine ". The hypothetical machine had an infinite store (memory in today's terminology) that contained both instructions and data. John von Neumann became acquainted with Turing while he

3550-469: The machine was to run at 1 MHz, eight times faster than the Mark I's 125 kHz, leading to the use of the name megacycle machine, and eventually Meg. Meg first ran in May 1954. The use of solid-state diodes reduced valve count by well over half, reducing the power requirement from the Mark I's 25 kW to the Meg's 12 kW. Like the Mark I, Meg was based on a 10-bit "short word", combining two to form

3621-445: The number of simultaneous instruction streams with multithreading or single-chip multiprocessing will make this bottleneck even worse. In the context of multi-core processors , additional overhead is required to maintain cache coherence between processors and threads. Aside from the von Neumann bottleneck, program modifications can be quite harmful, either by accident or design. In some simple stored-program computer designs,

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3692-467: The often-arduous process of physically rewiring and rebuilding the machine. It could take three weeks to set up and debug a program on ENIAC . With the proposal of the stored-program computer, this changed. A stored-program computer includes, by design, an instruction set , and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program ) that details the computation . A stored-program design also allows for self-modifying code . One early motivation for such

3763-492: The outcome of impending branches. The MU5 operating system MUSS was designed to be highly adaptable and was ported to a variety of processors at Manchester and elsewhere. In the completed MU5 system, three processors (MU5 itself, an ICL 1905E and a PDP-11 ), as well as a number of memories and other devices, were interconnected by a high-speed Exchange. All three processors ran a version of MUSS. MUSS also encompassed compilers for various languages and runtime packages to support

3834-524: The practicality of the Williams tube , an early form of computer memory based on standard cathode-ray tubes (CRTs); and to construct a machine that could be used to investigate how computers might be able to assist in the solution of mathematical problems. The first of the series, the Manchester Baby , ran its first program on 21 June 1948. As the world's first stored-program computer, the Baby, and

3905-437: The reliability of early batches of transistors meant that the machine's mean time between failures was about 90 minutes, which improved once the more reliable junction transistors became available. The Transistor Computer's design was adopted by the local engineering firm of Metropolitan-Vickers in their Metrovick 950 , in which all the circuitry was modified to make use of junction transistors. Six Metrovick 950s were built,

3976-471: The same hardware mechanism to encode and store both data and program instructions, but have caches between the CPU and memory, and, for the caches closest to the CPU, have separate caches for instructions and data, so that most instruction and data fetches use separate buses ( split-cache architecture ). The earliest computing machines had fixed programs. Some very simple computers still use this design, either for simplicity or training purposes. For example,

4047-615: The same underlying mechanism to encode both program instructions and data as opposed to designs which use a mechanism such as discrete plugboard wiring or fixed control circuitry for instruction implementation . Stored-program computers were an advancement over the manually reconfigured or fixed function computers of the 1940s, such as the Colossus and the ENIAC . These were programmed by setting switches and inserting patch cables to route data and control signals between various functional units. The vast majority of modern computers use

4118-406: The throughput between them, the bottleneck has become more of a problem, a problem whose severity increases with every new generation of CPU. The von Neumann bottleneck was described by John Backus in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture. According to Backus: Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through

4189-560: The von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand. Thus programming is basically planning and detailing the enormous traffic of words through the von Neumann bottleneck, and much of that traffic concerns not significant data itself, but where to find it. There are several known methods for mitigating

4260-498: The von Neumann report inspired the construction of the E.D.S.A.C. (electronic delay-storage automatic calculator) in Cambridge (see p. 130). In 1947, Burks, Goldstine and von Neumann published another report that outlined the design of another type of machine (a parallel machine this time) that would be exceedingly fast, capable perhaps of 20,000 operations per second. They pointed out that the outstanding problem in constructing such

4331-471: The world, equivalent to four IBM 7094s . It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the UK's computer capacity was lost. Its fastest instructions took 1.59 microseconds to execute, and the machine's use of virtual storage and paging allowed each concurrent user to have up to one million words of storage space available. Atlas pioneered many hardware and software concepts still in common use today including

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4402-570: Was a visiting professor at Cambridge in 1935, and also during Turing's PhD year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey during 1936–1937. Whether he knew of Turing's paper of 1936 at that time is not clear. In 1936, Konrad Zuse also anticipated, in two patent applications, that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data. Independently, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly , who were developing

4473-552: Was completed in April 1955. The 1955 version used 250 junction transistors, 1,300 solid-state diodes , and had a power consumption of 150 watts. The machine did however make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory , so it was not the first completely transistorised computer, a distinction that went to the Harwell CADET of 1955. Problems with

4544-585: Was delayed by the war. In 1945, however, an examination of the problems was made at the National Physical Laboratory by Mr. J. R. Womersley, then superintendent of the Mathematics Division of the Laboratory. He was joined by Dr. Turing and a small staff of specialists, and, by 1947, the preliminary planning was sufficiently advanced to warrant the establishment of the special group already mentioned. In April, 1948,

4615-723: Was delivered in August 1957. Manchester University received one in February 1958, leasing half the time to commercial users via Ferranti's business unit. Both CERN at Geneva and the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell also installed theirs in 1958. A Mercury bought in 1959 was the UK Met Office 's first computer. The University of Buenos Aires in Argentina received another one in 1960. The machine could run Mercury Autocode,

4686-418: Was in 1971, when the numbers, including research students, rose to 60. The most significant novel features of the MU5 processor were its instruction set and the use of associative memory to speed up operand and instruction accesses. The instruction set was designed to permit the generation of efficient object code by compilers, to allow for a pipeline organisation of the processor and to provide information to

4757-445: Was operational by April 1949. The Final Specification machine, which was fully working by October 1949, contained 4,050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. Perhaps the Manchester Mark 1's most significant innovation was its incorporation of index registers , commonplace on modern computers. In June 2022 an IEEE Milestone was dedicated to the "Manchester University "Baby" Computer and its Derivatives, 1948-1951". As

4828-460: Was poor. The primary concern was the drum memory system, which broke down all the time. Additionally, the machine used 4,200 thermionic valves , mostly EF50 pentodes and diodes that had to be replaced constantly. The Williams tubes, used as random-access memory and registers, were reliable but required constant maintenance. As soon as the system went into operation, teams started looking at solutions to these problems. One team decided to produce

4899-615: Was proposed. At that time, he and Mauchly were not aware of Turing's work. Von Neumann was involved in the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory . It required huge amounts of calculation, and thus drew him to the ENIAC project, during the summer of 1944. There he joined the ongoing discussions on the design of this stored-program computer, the EDVAC. As part of that group, he wrote up

4970-502: Was recently demonstrated at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, where it has been designed and built by a small team of mathematicians and electronics research engineers on the staff of the Laboratory, assisted by a number of production engineers from the English Electric Company, Limited. The equipment so far erected at the Laboratory is only the pilot model of a much larger installation which will be known as

5041-431: Was the successor to Atlas. An outline proposal for a successor to Atlas was presented at the 1968 IFIP Conference in Edinburgh, although work on the project and talks with ICT (of which Ferranti had become part) aimed at obtaining their assistance and support had begun in 1966. The new machine, later to become known as MU5, was intended to be at the top end of a range of machines and to be 20 times faster than Atlas. In 1968

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