200 | 20 BABy
University and by Ferranti Ltd. Computers using the Williams tube memory included TREAC,
built in Worcestershire at the secret establishment where Williams had done his radar work;
SEAC, constructed at the US National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC; SWAC, built
at the US National Bureau of Standards Western Division at the University of California, Los
Angeles; and the highly influential computer built at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study
(officially nameless, but informally known as MANIAC), as well as the Princeton computer’s
epoch-making successors, the IBM 701 and 702—and also AVIDAC, ORDVAC, ORACLE,
ILLIAC, SILLIAC, and other engagingly named first-generation computers.^6
It was Turing’s Bletchley Park colleague Max Newman (Fig. 14.6) who founded the
Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory, Baby’s birthplace. When Bletchley Park wrapped
up its operations at the end of the war, Newman became Fielden Professor of Mathematics
at Manchester. His dream was to create a new Newmanry, this time housing a true universal
Turing machine in hardware—a stored-program electronic computer that would revolutionize
peacetime mathematics and science, just as Colossus had revolutionized warfare. (For more
information on Max Newman, and his work at Bletchley Park and Manchester University, see
Chapters 14 and 40, and also my previous publications listed in Note 1.)
Unfortunately, traditional histories of the Manchester Baby have either ignored or under-
rated the role that Newman played in the Manchester computer project—and also the role
played by Turing himself. In his classic 1975 history of the Manchester computer project, Simon
Lavington stated that ‘Newman and his mathematicians took no active role in the design of
Manchester computers’, while Mary Croarken said in her 1993 history that ‘neither Newman
nor Turing had any influence on Williams’s designs for the computer’.^7 In fact, both played very
active roles in the computer developments at Manchester, as did their Bletchley Park colleague
figure 20.1 Baby. Freddie Williams is on the right, Tom Kilburn on the left.
Reproduced with permission of the University of Manchester School of Computer Science.