Recollections of the Mark 1

and Computing in Manchester up to 1965

These pages contain a set of formal and informal documents, written after the 1998 celebrations, which provide memories of the Mark 1 era at Manchester, and the following period up to (say) 1965, when Atlas was fully up and running in a stable form.

If you want to contribute to this, please contact me at brian.napper@manchester.ac.uk. I am happy to accept material in plain text, Word, HTML and pdf.

  1. Recollections of Manchester University (1945 - 1955) by Tommy Thomas. These are some general recollections by Tommy Thomas, who joined the Mark 1 team in October 1948 as a PhD student, to work on the drums. They include the following two pieces, which are also referred to in the main Mark 1 story on other pages.

  2. Recollections of "Magnetic Drum" Storage for the Mark I (1948 - 1951) by Tommy Thomas

  3. The Significance of Brooker's Autocodes in Taking the Early Manchester Machines into the Market. (1954 -1960) by Tommy Thomas

  4. Computational Chemistry in the 1950s by Professor Huw O. Pritchard, Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto, Canada.
        Huw Pritchard, when he was at the Department of Chemistry at Manchester, did a lot of work on the Mark 1 in collaboration with Frank Sumner, before and after Frank joined Tom Kilburn's team after getting his PhD in Chemistry in 1954.
        This page is a conversion into HTML of a paper published in the Journal of Molecular Graphics & Modelling, 19, 623-627 (2001), and is contained in Huw Pritchard's web pages.

  5. Personal Memories of the Late Professor Tom Kilburn CBE FRS by Joan Hart. Joan was Tom's private secretary for over 20 years. These memories were written at the time of Tom's memorial service.


Context : 50th Anniversary pages (The Mark 1 story, Celebrations, Virtual Museum)
        at : the School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester
Maintainer : Brian Napper; last updated October 2001
Copyright The University of Manchester 2001