manchester baby

5 Articles

An Entire Computer In ICMP Packets

January 25, 2022 by 19 Comments

The earliest stored program computer in the modern sense was not one of the names such as ENIAC or Colossus that you might expect, but the Manchester Baby, an experimental prototype computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. Its 550 tubes gave it the multi-rack room-filling size common to 1940s machines, but its architecture makes it a comparatively simple processor by the standards of today. So simple in fact, that [Hrvoje Čavrak] has recreated it using ICMP packets as its storage, and a custom packet filter as its processor emulation. It’s a project that’s simultaneously both elegant and gloriously pointless, but as he says, “It’s still better than doing drugs or JavaScript”.

The result simulates the Baby’s combined storage and display tube in a dump of the network traffic, and gives an excellent excuse to read up about its operation. The tiny instruction set brings to mind today’s RISC architectures, but this is illusory as the designers of 1948 would have had less of an eye towards clock cycles than they would have towards the machine working at all in the first place.

If early computers tickle your fancy it may be worth taking a while to read about the UK’s National Museum of Computing, and then about Colossus, the primordial electronic computer.

Header: Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Tony Brooker And Autocode – The First High-level Language

January 2, 2020 by 32 Comments

The field of computer science has undeniably changed the world for virtually every single person by now. Certainly for you as Hackaday reader, but also for everyone around you, whether they’re working in the field themselves, or are simply enjoying the fruits of convenience it bears. What was once a highly specialized niche field for a few chosen people has since grown into a discipline that not only created one of the biggest industry in modern times, but also revolutionized every other industry, some a few times over.

The fascinating part about all this is the relatively short time span it took to get here, and with that the privilege to live in an era where some of the pioneers and innovators, the proverbial giants whose shoulders every one of us is standing on, are still among us. Sadly, one of them, [Tony Brooker], a pioneer of the early programming language concept known as Autocode, passed away in November. Reaching the remarkable age of 94, the truly sad part however is that this might be the first time you hear his name, and there’s a fair chance you never heard of Autocode either.

But Autocode was probably the first high-level computer language, and as such played a fundamental role in the development of whatever you’re coding in today. So to honor the memory of [Tony Brooker], let’s remember the work he did with Autocode, and the leap in computer science history that it represented.

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Thanks For The Memories: Touring The Awesome Random Access Of Old

March 8, 2016 by 41 Comments

I was buying a new laptop the other day and had to make a choice between 4GB of memory and 8. I can remember how big a deal it was when a TRS-80 went from 4K (that’s .000004 GB, if you are counting) to 48K. Today just about all RAM (at least in PCs) is dynamic–it relies on tiny capacitors to hold a charge. The downside to that is that the RAM is unavailable sometimes while the capacitors get refreshed. The upside is you can inexpensively pack lots of bits into a small area. All of the common memory you plug into a PC motherboard–DDR, DDR2, SDRAM, RDRAM, and so on–are types of dynamic memory.

The other kind of common RAM you see is static. This is more or less an array of flip flops. They don’t require refreshing, but a static RAM cell is much larger than an equivalent bit of dynamic memory, so static memory is much less dense than dynamic. Static RAM lives in your PC, too, as cache memory where speed is important.

For now, at least, these two types of RAM technology dominate the market for fast random access read/write memory. Sure, there are a few new technologies that could gain wider usage. There’s also things like flash memory that are useful, but can’t displace regular RAM because of speed, durability, or complex write cycles. However, computers didn’t always use static and dynamic RAM. In fact, they are relatively newcomers to the scene. What did early computers use for fast read/write storage?

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BabyBaby: A 1948 Computer On An FPGA

January 6, 2016 by 11 Comments

The Manchester Baby seems simple today. A 32-bit machine with 32 words of storage. It wasn’t meant to be a computer, though, but a test bed for the new Williams tube storage device. However, in 1948, it executed stored programs at about 1,100 instructions per second. The success of the machine led to a series of computers at Manchester University and finally to the first commercially available computer, the Ferranti Mark I.

[Dave] is lucky enough to volunteer to demonstrate the Baby replica at Machester’s Museum of Science Industry. He wanted his own Baby, so he used a Xilinx FPGA board to build a replica Baby named BabyBaby. Although it runs at the same speed as the original, it is–mercifully–much smaller than the real machine.

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Really, Really Retro Computer On An FPGA

June 23, 2015 by 10 Comments

[Daniel Bailey] built himself a scaled-down clone of a very early computer in an FPGA. Specifically, he wrote some VHDL code to describe the machine in question, a scaled-down clone of the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine with an 8-bit processor and a whopping 8 bytes of RAM, all of which are displayed on an LED screen. Too cool.

That he can get it to do anything at all with such constraints amazes us. Watch him program it and put it through its paces in the video below the break.

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