All Early British Stored-Program Computers

Early British Stored-Program Computers are the sequence of pioneering machines built at British university and government laboratories between 1948 and the mid-1950s that first put the stored-program concept into working hardware. The Manchester Baby ran the world's first stored program in June 1948, proving that a computer could hold its own instructions in the same electronic memory as its data; the fuller Manchester Mark 1 followed as its production successor. The University of Cambridge's EDSAC, first run in 1949, became the first practical general-purpose stored-program computer to provide a regular computing service to its users. The National Physical Laboratory's Pilot ACE, built to a design based on Alan Turing's own wartime work, and the Harwell Computer, built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment for the UK's nuclear research programme, extended the same stored-program approach into government science computing. Together these five machines mark Britain's own independent line of first-generation computer development, running in parallel with, and in several cases ahead of, similar work in the United States.