Manchester Baby

The replica of the Manchester Baby at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, with its round cathode-ray tube display in the middle rack. The Baby was built at the University of Manchester to test the Williams tube, a way of storing bits as dots on a screen. On June 21, 1948, a 17-instruction program written by Tom Kilburn ran on it, the first program to run on an electronic stored-program computer. Holding the program in the same memory as the data, rather than in cables, is still how every computer works.