The Small Scale Experimental Machine - "The Baby" - ran its first program on 21 June 1948. You can find full historical and many technical details here.

A chance to program it yourself!

Competition is now closed.

The format of the competition was simple: entrants were invited to write an "interesting" program in The Baby's original instruction code, using an interactive Baby simulator written in Java.

What does "interesting" mean? That's up to you!

The Baby Simulator

The simulator system comprises:

• the simulator itself
• a graphical interface designed to look as authentic as possible to the original machine
• a set of sample programs
• a comprehensive reference manual, written by Chris Burton of the Computer Conservation Society.

You can program the simulator on-line, using the Java applet on this page (if a "certificate" pop-up appears, please accept it).

Or you can work completely off-line, by downloading the simulator and documentation (ZIP, 1.7Mb) directly to your computer.

The simulator should run with any version of Java from 1.5 upwards, and has been tested on Windows 98/2000/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Visit The Baby Replica at MOSI

You can visit an extremely accurate full-size working replica of The Baby, built in 1998 by a team led by Chris Burton. It's at MOSI, the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.