Department of Computer Science

PLEASE NOTE that this "Virtual Museum", except where it refers back to the main Computer50 website, provides little more than a brief description of the Manchester computers designed between 1952 and 1975, plus pictures of them. The Virtual Museum pages were created by Kulwinder S. Gill in a Third Year Project 1995/96 under the supervision of Dr. Ulrich D.F. Nehmzow. The material on the Mark 1 machines has been subsumed into the main website. Further material that Gill produced for the later machines, i.e. scanning a representative set of papers to go in the "Library", may or may not be completed in the forseeable future (by doing thorough proofreading and getting requisite copyright permissions).

The Virtual Museum of Manchester Computing

The University of Manchester has made a considerable contribution to the development of computing. This includes many "firsts" such as the first stored program computer, the first floating point machine, the first transistor computer and the first computer to use virtual memory.

This Web Museum aims to show the achievements in computer design in the Department of Electrical Engineering and then the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the years up to 1975. It focuses on the 5 major machines built here and the people who built them.

A single summary of this history can effectively be found in the biography of Tom Kilburn.

The Main Hall

The Floorplan

The Machine Hall | The People | The Library | The Timeline