502 | NOTES TO PAGES 206–209
- ‘Application from Professor M. H. A. Newman: project for a calculating machine laboratory in
Manchester University’ (Note 35), and ‘Report by Professor M. H. A. Newman on progress of com-
puting machine project’ (Note 41). - Michie in interview with Copeland, October 1995; Good, ‘Early notes on electronic computers’ (Note
52), pp. vii, ix. - Michie in an unpublished memoir sent to me in March 1997.
- Newman’s lectures were probably given in February 1947; see Good, ‘Early notes on electronic com-
puters’ (Note 52), p. iii. - Letter from Williams to Randell (Note 8).
- Williams in interview with Evans (Note 12).
- Letter from Williams to Randell (Note 8).
- Kilburn in interview with Copeland (Note 18).
- Good recounted this in his retrospective introduction (written in 1972) to a short paper, ‘The Baby
machine’, that he had prepared on 4 May 1947 at Kilburn’s request: see Good ‘Early notes on electronic
computers’ (Note 52), p. iv. - Good ‘The Baby machine’ (Note 66), p. 1. The table is from Copeland ‘The Manchester Computer: a
revised history. Part II’ (Note 1), p. 28. - The quotation is from Good’s revised typescript of his acceptance speech delivered on 15 October
1998, p. 31: I am grateful to Good for sending me a copy of his revised typescript in January 1999. On
Good’s gift of the twelve instructions to Kilburn, see also Croarken (Note 7), p. 15, and J. A. N. Lee,
Computer Pioneers, IEEE Computer Society Press (1995), p. 744. - Williams in interview with Evans (Note 12).
- Good, ‘The Baby machine’ (Note 66), pp. 1–2.
- Kilburn in interview with Copeland (Note 18).
- Williams and Kilburn (Note 2). This table is from Copeland ‘The Manchester Computer: a revised
history. Part II’ (Note 1), p. 26. - In an earlier note ‘Fundamental operations’, written c.16 February 1947, Good listed a larger and
considerably more complicated set of basic instructions. These included multiplication, division,
|x|, two forms of conditional transfer of control, and an instruction transferring the number in the
accumulator to the ‘house number in’ house x (the note is in his ‘Early notes on electronic comput-
ers’, Note 52). David Anderson argued that Baby was based on that instruction set (D. Anderson,
‘Was the Manchester Baby conceived at Bletchley Park?’, University of Portsmouth Research Report
UoP-HC-2006-001, published on the internet in 2006 at http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/
andersod/HoC). This claim is incorrect: it was the May instruction set, not the more complex
February set, that Kilburn received from Good and simplified to five instructions (plus ‘stop’). Unlike
the May instruction set, the February set was intended for a machine with two instructions per word,
whereas Baby had only one. Good made it clear that it was the May set, not the February set, that he
suggested in response to Kilburn’s request ‘for a small number of basic instructions’. - Burks et al. (Note 24), see especially Sections 5.5, 6, and Table 1. The operation ‘transfer the number in
A to R’ is discussed in Section 6.6.3, where it is pointed out that this operation can be made basic at the
cost of ‘very little extra equipment’. The two shift operations L and R are introduced in Section 6.6.7.
For additional detail, see Copeland ‘The Manchester Computer: a revised history. Part II’ (Note 1),
pp. 29–31. - See Copeland ‘The Manchester Computer: a revised history. Part II’ (Note 1), p. 30.
- F. C. Williams and T. Kilburn, ‘The University of Manchester Computing Machine’, in Review of
Electronic Digital Computers: Joint AIEE-IRE Computer Conference, American Institute of Electrical
Engineers (1952); F. C. Williams, T. Kilburn, and G. C. Tootill, ‘Universal high-speed digital com-
puters: a small-scale experimental machine’, Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 98
(1951), 13–28. - This is made clear by a comparison of Section 6.4 of Burks et al. (Note 24), with Williams and Kilburn
(Note 76), pp. 57–8, and Williams et al. (Note 76), pp. 17–18. - Huskey (Note 57), p. 535.