page_title: Manchester Baby
section_title: Later developments
hierarchical_section_title: Manchester Baby / Later developments
caption_attribution_description: English: The Small Scale Experimental Beer Machine (microbrewery) at Brewdog Outpost Manchester
context_page_description: The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was the first electronic stored-program computer, was built at the University of Manchester, UK, by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.
  The machine was not intended to be a practical computer, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Although considered "small and primitive" even by the standards of its own time, it was nonetheless the first working machine to contain all the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.
  The Baby had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words.
context_section_description: Williams and Kilburn reported on the Baby in a letter to the Journal Nature, published in September 1948. The machine's successful demonstration quickly led to the construction of a more practical computer, the Manchester Mark 1, work on which began in August 1948. The first version was operational by April 1949, and it in turn led directly to the development of the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.
  
  In 1998, a working replica of the Baby, now on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, was built to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the running of its first program. Demonstrations of the machine in operation are held regularly at the museum. In 2008, an original panoramic photograph of the entire machine was discovered at the University of Manchester. The photograph, taken on 15 December 1948 by a research student, Alec Robinson, had been reproduced in The Illustrated London News in June 1949.
caption: BrewDog named their microbrewery in Manchester the Small Scale Experimental Beer Machine in honour of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM)
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