The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine was the world's first stored-program computer. It was built at the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. The machine was not intended to be a practical computer but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory. It was considered "small and primitive" compared to its contemporaries, although it did contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the SSEM had demonstrated the feasibility of its design a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. The SSEM had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words. It was designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer; the only arithmetic operation it could perform was subtraction. The first of the three programs written for the machine found the highest factor of 218 (262,144), a calculation it was known would take a long time to run—and so prove the computer's reliability. The program consisted of 17 instructions and ran for 52 minutes before reaching the correct answer of 131,072, after the SSEM had performed 3.5 million operations.

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1431:

Hundred Years' War: Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, France after being convicted of heresy in a politically motivated trial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc

1536:

Jane Seymour, a former lady-in-waiting, became Queen of England by marrying King Henry VIII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Seymour

1913:

The Treaty of London was signed to deal with territorial adjustments arising out of the conclusion of the First Balkan War, declaring, among other things, an independent Albania. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_London_%281913%29

1967:

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu announced the establishment of Biafra, a secessionist state in southeastern Nigeria, an event that sparked the Nigerian Civil War one week later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra

1989:

Goddess of Democracy, a ten meter (33 ft) high statue made mostly of polystyrene foam and papier-mâché, was erected by student protestors in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_of_Democracy

1998:

A 6.9 Mw earthquake struck northern Afghanistan, killing at least 4,000 people, destroying more than 30 villages, and leaving 45,000 people homeless in the Afghan Provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_30%2C_1998_Afghanistan_earthquake

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

tittle (n): 1. A small amount; an iota.

2. The dot (or diacritic replacing it) on the Latin letters i and j http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tittle

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. --Mikhail Bakunin http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin