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key idea of storing programs in memory. But Flowers, who wanted to get Colossus working as
quickly as possible, sensibly took no interest in including extra complications that went beyond
what was strictly required for the job in hand.
As soon as he saw Colossus, Turing realized that electronics offered the means to build a
miraculously fast universal stored-program computer.^5 Nevertheless, another four years would
elapse before the first universal Turing machine in hardware ran the first stored program, on
Monday 21 June 1948—the first day of the modern computer age. Based on Turing’s ideas,
and almost big enough to fill a room, this distant ancestor of our laptops, phones, and tablets
was named simply ‘Baby’. Thereafter, electronic stored-program universal digital computers
became ever smaller and faster, until now they fit into coat pockets and school satchels, linking
each of us to the whole wide world.
As explained in Chapter 20, two brilliant electronic engineers, Freddie Williams and Tom
Kilburn, built Baby at Manchester University. Turing taught Kilburn the fundamentals of com-
puter design during a course of lectures that he gave in London in 1946–47. By the end of
the course, Kilburn was expertly applying the ideas that he had learned from Turing, and was
soon drawing up preliminary schematics for Manchester’s Baby. Baby was wired together in
the Computing Machine Laboratory that Newman had recently established at the university.
Newman had presided over Bletchley Park’s giant installation of nine Colossi, in fact the world’s
first electronic computing facility.
Turing’s ACE
At the end of the war, Newman—like Turing, gripped by the dream of building an electronic
universal computing machine—had taken up the Fielden Chair of Mathematics at Manchester
University.^6 Meanwhile, Turing joined London’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to design
an electronic universal stored-program computer—the Automatic Computing Engine, or
ACE.^7 So began the race between London and Manchester to create the first universal comput-
ing machine in hardware.
figure 6.1 Tommy Flowers.
The Turing Archive for the History of
Computing. Photo restored by Jack
Copeland and Dustin Parry.