Sunday, June 22, 2008
Baby is sixty
The world's first computer, "Baby", is sixty. Weighed a ton and had 120 bytes for memory. Not megabytes, not kilobytes, just bytes. I can't even imagine how you can do anything with 120 bytes.
Apparently the computer revolution was sparked near where I live, in Manchester. Watch the video, it's fun.
Update: Alex points out that Baby was also the mother of the earliest known recording of computer-generated music.
I like how the more formal name for Baby was "Small Scale Experimental Machine". These days a "small scale" computer is something you can hide under a fingernail.