Computing with Quantum Cats by John Gribbin Page A

first time on May 10, 1950. It contained a thousand electronic valves, and used just a third of the amount of electronic equipment of contemporary British computers, but ran five times faster than them. The design was adapted and taken up by the English Electric Company as DEUCE, and thirty-three DEUCE machines were built and used commercially in the 1950s and 1960s—the last one was shut down in 1970. The first “personal” desk-side computer, housed in a cabinet about the size of a tall kitchen refrigerator, was also based on the ACE design. Marketed by the American Bendix Corporation as the G15, it went on sale in 1954. But even by then, the mainstream of computer design was flowing in a different channel, although the idea of a personal computer was an indication of things to come.
    In Cambridge, computer development consciously jumped off from the work in the United States which I will discuss in Chapter 2 ; even the name of the first Cambridge computer, EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), was deliberately chosen to show its relationship to the American EDVAC. Turing, whose philosophy was to minimize the amount of hardware by maximizing the use of software, described it as “in the American tradition of solving one's difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought.” 19 He was right, but did not appreciate that the average computer user could not think as well as he did, or that the cost of equipment would fall so dramatically, so that today any idiot can use a computer.
    The team Turing joined in Manchester was headed by Max Newman, by now Professor of Mathematics; Newman had actually taken unidentifiable bits of a dismantled Colossus to Manchester with him, where some of the pieces were incorporated in the first Manchester computer. It had the distinction of being the first to run a successful program on a stored-program electronic computer. The date was June 21, 1948, and the computer was the “Manchester Baby,” with a random access memory (RAM) equivalent in modern terms to 128 bytes. But it worked. The Baby was the forerunner of the Manchester University Mark I computer, for which Turing developed the programming systems. Audrey Bates, one of the MSc students using the Manchester computer under Turing's supervision in 1948–9, asked if she could go on to work for a PhD; she was told by Newman that he thought it unlikely that anyone would ever get a PhD for working with computers.
    Input and output for the Mark I used a system familiar from Bletchley Park days—teleprinter paper tape with a five-bit code punched into it. This kind of tape was still in use for communicating with computers well into the 1960s. As an undergraduate taking a very basic computer course as part of my physics degree I had to prepare programs in this way, before the tapes were taken off to another institution and fed into a computer I never saw (Sussex University didn't have its own computer in those days); the output would be returned a couple of days later as another roll of punched tape (usually with errors caused by the incompetent programming). The Mark I was developed into another commercial machine, the Ferranti Mark I, which in the early 1950s was the most powerful “supercomputer” around—with a RAM of 1 kilobyte.It used 3,600 valves, housed in two bays each 17 feet long and 9 feet high, and consumed 25 kilowatts of electricity.
    Among Turing's many “firsts,” he now became the first person to program a computer to play musical notes by adjusting the speed of “beeps” sent to a loudspeaker. Learning of this, Christopher Strachey (a nephew of Lytton Strachey), who had been a pre-war contemporary of Turing at King's and had written a program to play draughts (checkers) on NPL's ACE machine, came to Manchester and wrote programs that could play “God Save the King,” “In the Mood” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” In