Talk:Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

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M. Williams, in the reference, gives the information about first running first a simple division program, then the relatively prime program, and then the factor of an integer program. Every other source I've seen (including the website in the external link, computer 50) just mentions the third one, calling it the first stored program to run. It seems logical to me that they would first test just the division routine, wo Williams' description seems reasonable. If that is true, then you could argue that the division routine was actually first. If that is considered too trivial, an arguement could be made that the relatively prime program was about as sophisticated as the largest factor program.

Also, Williams says that the relatively prime program used the division routine. Given the instruction set (mainly a subtraction operation, data moves, branch, and stop), it might make more sense to use the original verison of Euclid's algorithm, which uses subtraction only (instead of division). I wonder if that was done.

Can anyone comment on this? --Bubba73 15:33, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If the division routine ran first, then the division routine was the first program. You can't exclude it on grounds of triviality - if it's a sequence of instructions, it's a program, and if those instructions were executed, then the program ran. You might argue that the coprimeness or factoring programs were the first applications to run, but that's a whole other kettle of fish!

As for the implementation of the coprimality test: a subtraction-based Euclid's algorithm would be simpler to write from scratch, but since they'd written the division routine by that point, i suppose it wasn't that much harder to write a division-based one, and a division-based one will run much faster. That makes the second program another landmark - the first reuse of a software component!

-- Tom Anderson (not a user) 2006-02-05

[edit] Trivia

One of my first lectures @ Manchester (1996) was by ( as I recall) Tom Kilburn about the Baby, Mark I and early computers, in it he said that one of the problems they had was that due to the departments location on Oxford Road in manchester and the CRT memory units, whenever a badly maintained moped drove past it scrammbled the memory and crashed the computer. If anyone wants to put this in and/or comfirm/fill in blanks be my guest.--ElvisThePrince 11:15, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] CRT

The article does not say what CRT means. Billlion 10:43, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I've clarified this in the 2nd paragraph -- the Williams tube is a type of cathode ray tube (CRT). Greg 12:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)