Two scientists work with the world’s first modern computer in 1948. It weighed one-ton and filled a whole room

It may look like a ramshackle collection of old parts. But this one-tonne ‘baby’ is the mother of all modern computers. Without it, we would not have personal computers, phones, iPods or the internet. Nicknamed Baby, it whirred to life 60 years ago in a nondescript laboratory at Manchester University.

More properly known as the Small Scale Experimental Machine, its components included metal Post Office racks, garden fence posts, Meccano pieces and Spitfire radios left over from the war. Instead of a screen, information, in the form of glowing dots and dashes, was read directly off the face of a cathode ray tube. Computers before Baby were little more than sophisticated calculating machines. But Baby could be programmed to carry out dozens of different tasks and, more importantly, could alter its own programme. At first, it failed in its task to solve a problem involving prime numbers. But shortly after 11am on June 21st 1948 the display tube lit up with the right answer - and the computer was born.

In 1951, Baby was dismantled to make way for bigger and better models. However, a working replica is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Despite its short life, it played a pivotal role in the digital revolution, paving the way for home computers long before Microsoft’s Bill Gates was even born.

Compared with today’s computers, Baby was a dinosaur, with less computing power than a modern calculator. Its memory was capable of storing just 1024 bits. The memory of the average home computer is around 1.5billion times bigger. Relatively simple calculations could take almost an hour to perform and a tendency to overheat meant the laboratory’s windows had to be open even on the coldest day [source]