The earliest stored program computer in the modern sense was not one of the names such as ENIAC or Colossus that you might expect, but the Manchester Baby, an experimental prototype computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. Its 550 tubes gave it the multi-rack room-filling size common to 1940s machines, but its architecture makes it a comparatively simple processor by the standards of today. So simple in fact, that [Hrvoje Čavrak] has recreated it using ICMP packets as its storage, and a custom packet filter as its processor emulation. It’s a project that’s simultaneously both elegant and gloriously pointless, but as he says, “It’s still better than doing drugs or JavaScript”.
The result simulates the Baby’s combined storage and display tube in a dump of the network traffic, and gives an excellent excuse to read up about its operation. The tiny instruction set brings to mind today’s RISC architectures, but this is illusory as the designers of 1948 would have had less of an eye towards clock cycles than they would have towards the machine working at all in the first place.
If early computers tickle your fancy it may be worth taking a while to read about the UK’s National Museum of Computing, and then about Colossus, the primordial electronic computer.
Header: Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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