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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tony1 (talk | contribs) at 12:43, 12 March 2009 (→Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine: Bit wobbly). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

Nominator(s): Malleus Fatuorum
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It is with some trepidation that I present this account of the development of the world's first stored-program computer at the University of Manchester. The machine was designed as a test-bed for an early form of computer memory and was only in existence for a few months before being further developed to become a practical computer, so some technical details are inevitably sketchy. I believe nevertheless that this article gives a comprehensive account of the SSEM's construction and the background to its development in 1948. Malleus Fatuorum 15:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • As an explanation, as Malleus will not be around to address any concerns raised during the nomination, the Greater Manchester WikiProject would like to take over the nomination. On behalf of the project, I believe we can deal with issues that may be raised; I know that I at least have access to some of the sources used in the article. Thank for your time, Nev1 (talk) 01:40, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, well written article on an interesting and important subject. But it would be nice to know how long this computer operated for, what happened to it and whether it had the the reliability problems of so many pre silicon computers. Also there's a reference to tape, if the sources say whether this was paper or magnetic tape it would be nice to link it appropriately (I suspect from the date it would be the former). WereSpielChequers 17:12, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks for your support. The machine only existed in its completed form for a few weeks. Once it had proven the practicality of the Williams tube and the stored-program approach it quickly evolved into a prototype for the Manchester Mark 1, with bits being continually added and/or redesigned. I'll try to make that clearer in the article. With a few hunded valves there's every reason to believe that it suffered from the same problems as other valved machines, but there's no information on its reliability that I've been able to find. It has to be remembered that the machine was in constant development and it was never intended as a practical computer anyway; work on it never really finished, it just evolved into the Mark 1.
    • The reference to "tape" is in relation to the Turing machine. The SSEM had no tape; I/O was done by manual switches, setting the value of each word in turn. I've added a phrase to the brief description of the Turing machine to hopefully clarify that as well. --Malleus Fatuorum 17:41, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments -

Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:40, 1 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Malleus, it's good, but you need to watch your sentence construction and related punctuation. Many people would kill to have such an easy-to-fix issue, rather than deeper, more problematic issues; but fix it you must. It does need massaging throughout.

  • "This lead to the setting up of"—That's on the periodic table, is it?
  • " Tommy Flowers and his team from the General Post Office's (GPO) Dollis Hill Research Laboratory were approached; but eventually turned it down due to other commitments, although they did build some mercury delay lines for ACE.[9] The semicolon (unless a boundary between items in a list) is normally followed by a grammatical sentence ("he" is missing). Not thrilled with "but" then "although".
  • "Performing" rather than "doing", formally? (DSIR). I guess we need this density of initialism: "The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), who ran the NPL, pressed the TRE by assigning the highest priority to ACE in respect of all the work that TPE was doing for DSIR." Maybe.
  • "and that others would work with"

"Early electronic computers were generally programmed by being rewired, or via plugs and patch panels. There was no separate program stored in memory, as in a modern computer; it could take several days to reprogram ENIAC, for instance." Try:

"Early electronic computers were generally programmed through rewiring, or via plugs and patch panels; there was no separate program stored in memory, as in a modern computer, and it could take as long as several days, for example, to reprogram ENIAC."

"EDVAC was under development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Flowers and Wilkes had visited the Moore School of Electrical Engineering and attended a presentation on EDVAC; EDSAC was being developed at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory; and Professor Max Newman had moved to the University of Manchester and hoped to set up a calculating machine laboratory based on the use of the Selectron tube memory that was under development by RCA." Try this; there's a distressing comma splice, inter alia—

"EDVAC was under development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where Flowers and Wilkes had visited and attended a presentation on EDVAC [earlier in 1946?]. EDSAC was under development at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory; and Professor Max Newman had moved to the University of Manchester and hoped to set up a calculating machine laboratory based on the use of the Selectron tube memory that was being developed by RCA."

Is the use of so many "develops" OK? Maybe it's reasonable as a parallelism in this bit of the text, where I can't think of an alternative. But I see lots of this word everywhere. It's not always possible to substitute, but the usual ones are "devise", "create", "research", "discover", "construct", and "reveal".

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