Bringing Up Baby: First "Modern Computer" Turns 60

The Small Scale Experimental Machine, or "Baby", was the first to contain memory which could store a program.

The room-sized computer's ability to carry out different tasks - without having to be rebuilt - has led some to describe it as the "first modern PC".

Using just 128 bytes of memory, it successfully ran its first set of instructions - to determine the highest factor of a number - on 21 June 1948.

"We were extremely excited," Geoff Tootill, one of the builders of Baby told BBC News.

"We congratulated each other and then went and had lunch in the canteen."

Baby was the successor to machines such as the American ENIAC and the UK's Colossus.

How the BBC reported on the birth of "Baby" in 1948

ENIAC was built to calculate the trajectory of shells for the US army, whilst Colossus was used to decrypt messages from the German High Command during World War II.

Baby morphed into the Manchester Mark I and eventually the first commercial general purpose computer, the Ferranti Mark I.

"It really must have been an extraordinary, exciting and heady time," said Mr Burton.

A working replica of Baby is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.