Happy Birthday! Sixty five years ago, in a cluttered lab in Manchester, UK, three scientists changed the world of computing forever. Working with a gigantic state of the art machine they'd built and nicknamed Baby, they entered the history books as the people who ran the worlds first ever program to be stored electronically in a computer's memory.

Put together by “Freddie” Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, the computer was 5 meters long, weighed 2000lbs, and was a testbed for the experimental Williams-Kilburn tube, a recently proposed way to store bits of data using a cathode ray tube. If it worked, it looked set to provide the first ever means of storing and flexibly accessing information in electronic form.

It worked, and supplied Baby with the earliest form of RAM—a whopping 128 bytes! (My computer has 16GB, which is an amazing 1.7 Billion bytes, and the average computer has abot 4-6 Billion bytes!) This allowed the computer to be the first to run a program electronically stored in its memory—a watershed event for the world of computing.

Sadly Baby was only a proof-of-concept, and today nothing remains of the original device—though a replica is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, UK. If you are ever in Manchester, go see it!