David Anderson, University of Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK

Topic: The story of how the world’s first stored-program computer came to be developed at the University of Manchester in the immediate post-war period is conventionally told only from an engineering or technical perspective. The dominant discourse to which this has given rise may be characterized as what Mike Mahoney calls an “insider history”, which, almost completely de-contextualized, fails to explain adequately the behavior of historical actors.

Argument: I examine the institutional imperatives which led to the location of computing activity at Manchester and reject the usual portrayal of M.H.A. Newman, I.J. Good and D. Rees of the Department of Mathematics as merely bit-part players whose independent attempts to build a computer failed while a rival effort in the Department of Electrotechnics carried all before it. Newman is re-situated as the initiator, leader, and principal financial supporter of a single unified project. It is demonstrated that Newman was engaged in an active and officially-sanctioned transfer of computing know-how from the classified Colossus computer at Bletchley Park into the civilian world. It is further shown that the contribution made by members of the Mathematics Department was very significant and did not, as the conventional narrative would have it, amount merely to offering encouragement to the engineers, F.C. Williams and T. Kilburn.
Evidence: Previously unpublished material from the UK National Archives is examined together with correspondence and reports written by the principal players. Using material from the Royal Society archives and the Council minutes of the University of Manchester it has been possible to reconstruct, for the first time, the funding of the SSEM project. Finally, contemporaneous notes made by I.J. Good and not previous published are used to illustrate the contribution made to the project by members of the Mathematics Department. The whole is contextualized resulting in the exposure of a number of historical myths underpinning the dominant discourse and, by so doing, the way is opened to a more nuanced account of the development of the stored memory digital computer.

Contribution to Existing Literature: This paper provides a counterbalance to previous accounts such as Simon H. Lavington’s “Early British Computers” and “A History of Manchester Computers”, Chris Burton’s “Replicating the Manchester Baby: Motives, Methods, and Messages from the Past” and Mary Croarken’s “The Beginnings of the Manchester Computer Phenomenon: People and Influences”.