Mobile Baby as one tonne computer goes pocket sized

Boffins at the University of Manchester have recreated the 1948 “Baby” computer as a mobile phone application.

The giant, 1 tonne computer is the size of a room and was created using bits of Spitfire radios and old Post Office racks. It made history by running a simple routine to determine the highest factor of a number.

It was also the first computer to store information in its memory and thus changed computing forever.

As part of the Manchester Science Festival, Dr Andrew Robinson at the University has written a mobile phone application which mimics The Baby, even down to the green screen.

In a race that The Baby will never win, you can test your mobile’s performance against it.


“Although the list of devices containing computers is almost endless, fundamentally they all operate on the same principle, which can be traced back over 60 years to The Baby,” explained said Dr Robinson.



“This application demonstrates how computers were embedded into our everyday lives and how computational performance has increased whilst their size and energy have decreased.”



The app should run on any phone that supports Java.


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