History of Computers - Tom Kilburn
Page created by Kate Clarke
Overview
Tom Kilburn was an English engineer. With Freddie Williams he worked on the Williams Tube and the first stored-program computer in the world, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), while working at the University of Manchester.
Kilburn was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire and graduated in mathematics from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, pursuing a course compressed to two years following the outbreak of World War II. On graduation, he was recruited by C.P. Snow for unspecified secret work and found himself on a crash course in electronics before being posted to the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern to work on radar under F.C. Williams.
Kilburn's wartime work inspired his enthusiasm for some form of electronic computer. The principal technical barrier to such a development at that time was the lack of any practical means of storage for data and instructions. Kilburn and Williams collaboratively developed a storage device based on a cathode ray tube and capable of storing a single bit. A patent was filed in 1946.
In December 1946, Williams took up the chair of electrotechnics at Manchester and recruited Kilburn on secondment from Malvern. The two developed their storage technology and, in 1948, Kilburn put it to a practical test in constructing the Small-Scale Experimental Machine which became the first stored-program computer to run a program, on June 21, 1948.
Kilburn received the degree of Ph.D. for his work at Manchester and had then anticipated a return to Malvern. However, Williams persuaded him to stay to work on the university's collaborative project developing the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial computer. Over the next three decades, Kilburn led the development of a succession of innovative Manchester computers including Atlas and MU5.
Significance
Tom Kilburn is significant to computer history because he helped to create the Williams Tube and Baby. The Williams Tube and Baby were used for memory storage and processes - and were one of the first systems to be able to store memories that could be accessed again by a user.
External Links
- http://www.computer50.org/
- http://www.digital60.org/about/biographies/tomkilburn/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Kilburn
