page_title: List of English inventions and discoveries
section_title: Computing
hierarchical_section_title: List of English inventions and discoveries / Computing
caption_attribution_description: Obituary portrait of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) published in The Illustrated London News on 4 November 1871. The original caption was "The late Mr. Babbage." This portrait was derived from a photograph of Babbage taken at the Fourth International Statistical Congress which took place in London in July 1860.[1] Hook, Dinan (2002). Origins of cyberspace: a library on the history of computing, networking, and telecommunications. Norman Publishing. pp. 161, 165, ISBN 0930405854
context_page_description: English inventions and discoveries are objects, processes or techniques invented, innovated or discovered, partially or entirely, in England by a person from England. Often, things discovered for the first time are also called inventions and in many cases, there is no clear line between the two. Nonetheless, science and technology in England continued to develop rapidly in absolute terms. Furthermore, according to a Japanese research firm, over 40% of the world’s inventions and discoveries were made in the UK, followed by France with 24% of the world’s inventions and discoveries made in France and followed by the US with 20%.
  The following is a list of inventions, innovations or discoveries known or generally recognised to be English.
context_section_description: 1822: The Difference Engine, an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions, proposed by Charles Babbage (1791–1871).
  1837: The Analytical Engine, a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, designed by Charles Babbage (1791–1871).
  1842: The person regarded as the first computer programmer was Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), only legitimate child of the poet Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth.
  1842: First programming language, the Analytical Engine order code, produced by Charles Babbage (1791–1871) and Ada Lovelace (1815–1852).
  1854: Boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic, conceived by George Boole (1815–1864).
  1912: Argo system, the world's first electrically powered mechanical analogue computer, invented by Arthur Pollen (1866–1937).
  1918: The flip-flop circuit, which became the basis of electronic memory (Random-access memory) in computers, invented by William Eccles (1875–1966) and F. W. Jordan (1882–?).
  1936–1937: The Universal Turing machine invented by Alan Turing (1912–1954). The UTM is considered to be the origin of the stored programme computer used in 1946 for the "Electronic Computing Instrument" that now bears John von Neumann's name: the Von Neumann architecture.
  1939: The Bombe, a device used by the British to decipher German secret messages during World War II, invented by Alan Turing (1912–1954).
  1943–1944: The Colossus computer – the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer – invented by Tommy Flowers (1905–1988).
  1946–1950: ACE and Pilot ACE invented by Alan Turing (1912–1954).
  1946–1947: The Williams tube, a cathode ray tube used to store electronically (500 to 1,000 bits of) binary data, developed by Frederic Calland Williams (1911–1977) and Tom Kilburn (1921–2001).
  1948: The Manchester Baby – the world's first electronic stored-programme computer – built by Frederic Calland Williams (1911–1977) and Tom Kilburn (1921–2001) at the Victoria University of Manchester.
  1949: The Manchester Mark 1 computer developed by Frederic Calland Williams (1911–1977) and Tom Kilburn (1921–2001); historically significant because of its pioneering inclusion of index registers.
  1949: EDSAC – the first complete, fully functional computer inspired by the von Neumann architecture, the basis of every modern computer – constructed by Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010).
  Late 1940s/early 1950s: The integrated circuit, commonly called the microchip, conceptualised and built by Geoffrey Dummer (1909–2002).
  February 1951: The Ferranti Mark 1 (a.k.a. the Manchester Electronic Computer), the world's first successful commercially available general-purpose electronic computer, invented by Frederic Calland Williams (1911–1977) and Tom Kilburn (1921–2001).
  1951: The first known recordings of computer generated music played on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer using a programme designed by Christopher Strachey (1916–1975).
  1951: LEO made history by running the first business application (payroll system) on an electronic computer for J. Lyons and Co. Under the advice of Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010), LEO was designed by John Pinkerton (1919–1997) and David Caminer (1915–2008).
  1951: Concept of microprogramming developed by Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) from the realisation that the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer could be controlled by a miniature, highly specialised computer programme in high-speed ROM.
  1952: Autocode developed by Alick Glennie (1925–2003) for the Manchester Mark 1 computer; Autocode is regarded as the first computer compiler.
  1952: The first graphical computer game, OXO or Noughts and Crosses, programmed on the EDSAC at Cambridge University as part of a Ph.D. thesis by A.S. Douglas (1921–2010).
  1952: First trackball built by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor (1908–1996); invented 1947 by Ralph Benjamin.
  1956 onwards: Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistor computer, built by the Metropolitan-Vickers Company of Manchester.
  1958: EDSAC 2, the first computer to have a microprogrammed (Microcode) control unit and a bit slice hardware
caption: "Father of the computer", Charles Babbage (1791–1871)
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