Ferranti Computers

Ferranti was a British electrical engineering company that built a series of pioneering commercial computers beginning in the early 1950s, several of them developed in partnership with the University of Manchester. The Ferranti Mercury, grown out of the Manchester University Meg prototype, used electrostatic storage and later core memory, and roughly 19 units were sold to universities and industrial customers across Britain and abroad. The Ferranti Pegasus, introduced in 1956, became the company's most popular vacuum-tube system with 38 units sold, valued by customers for its reliability and straightforward instruction set. Both machines followed directly from Ferranti's earlier Mark 1, the world's first commercially available stored-program computer completed in 1951, and represent the company's continuing effort through the 1950s to turn university computer research into commercially viable products for British industry and academia.