Department of Computer Science

A Timeline of Manchester Computing

Manchester Built Machines

1948 SSEM, the "Baby" - World's first stored program computer.

1949 Manchester Mark 1 - First machine with fast random-access two-level store (RAM + Disc).

1951 Ferranti Mark 1 - First commercially-available machine.

1953 Manchester Transistor Computer - The first computer to use transistors instead of valves.

1954 Meg - Support for hardware floating point. Manufactured by Ferranti as the Mercury.

1962 Atlas - World's fastest computer when it was built, included virtual memory. The largest version at Chilton had a massive 48k of memory. First British computer to be used remotely via data links.

1974 MU5 - Architecture used by ICL for their series 2900 mainframes.

1982-1987 MU6 - Last of the Manchester machines, it produced similar performance to MU5 at a fraction of the cost, and ran the MUSS multi-user operating system.



More detailed time chart.


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