Digital 60

When Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn came to Manchester in the late 1940’s to begin work on a problem that had been baffling scientists for years, the ability of a machine with a memory to store information, not even he could have envisaged the ways in which his invention would shape the modern world. It was the world’s first stored-program computer the 'Small Scale Experimental Machine' (SSEM), it ran for the first time on June 21st 1948, and nothing was ever the same again. 2008 sees the 60th anniversary of this amazing achievement and it was designed and built at the University of Manchester.