By the autumn of 1947 Kilburn had constructed a practical random-access memory device, later known as the Williams–Kilburn tube. Williams and Kilburn decided to incorporate the tube into a small-scale experimental computer, “to subject the memory system to the most searching tests possible”. This small-scale computer, sometimes called the 'Baby', first ran a program on the morning of Monday 21 June 1948. The event was described in a letter to Nature published later that year (162, 487; 1948).
The 1948 Manchester computer contained only a few words (128 bytes) of storage. It was built from war-surplus electronic components, the rudimentary input being via push-buttons recycled from the radio-channel selector panels of Spitfire aircraft. Yet this small machine provided the first convincing demonstration of the stored-program principle, which is the basis of every modern computer. From this prototype, the British company Ferranti Ltd developed the world's first commercially available computer, known as the Ferranti Mark I. The first production model was delivered in February 1951, marginally ahead of the much larger UNIVAC 1 computer developed by Eckert and Mauchley in the United States.
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