By Kristen Philipkoski
Fifty years after Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams built Baby - the first stored-program computer and the prototype of the Mark 1 - the machine will run again. Computer conservationist Chris Burton, who spent years collecting the cathode-ray and vacuum tubes, built a replica (now at England's Manchester Museum of Science and Industry) to show how far technology has come. "Compare Baby to the cyberpets of today," he says. To drive the point home, Burton organized a competition to program Baby. Contestants must download a simulator (www.cs.man.ac.uk/prog98/) and use vintage code; the judges - including Kilburn - will select the entry that best uses Baby's 1,024 bits of memory and its only arithmetic function - subtraction. The winning program will be run on June 21, Baby's birthday.
ELECTRIC WORD
Two Men and a Baby