![]() ![]() Thus Phoenix became, literally, a computing environment like no other.įor more than two decades Phoenix was a central fixture of life at Cambridge. However, just as the hackers at MIT had made their DEC machines their own by writing their own operating systems and tools from scratch, those at Cambridge replaced most of IBM’s standard software with new programs of their own. Coming online in February of 1973, Phoenix - the name was meant to evoke a phoenix rising from the ashes of the newly decommissioned Titan - was a big IBM 370 mainframe of the sort found in major companies all over the world. ![]() It must therefore have seemed a dismaying sign of the changing times when the university elected to buy its next big mainframe off the shelf, as it were - and from an American company at that. All of these had been essentially one-off, custom-built machines constructed by the university itself in cooperation with various British technology companies. After EDSAC-1 came EDSAC-2 in 1958, which was in turned replaced by Titan in 1964. At risk of wading into a debate that has swirled for years, there’s a real argument to be made that EDSAC-1 was the first real computer in the sense of being something that operated reasonably akin to what we mean when we use the term today.) In 1953 Cambridge became the first university to recognize computer science as a taught discipline.įor decades computing in and around Cambridge centered on whatever colossus was currently installed in the bowels of the Computing Laboratory. (The earlier American ENIAC was programmable only by switching logic gates and rerouting cabling in an elaborate game of Mouse Trap that could consume weeks. Most spectacularly of all, it was at Cambridge in 1949 that EDSAC-1 - the first stored-program fully electronic computer, meaning the first that could be programmed the way we understand that term today - first came online. It was Cambridge that nurtured Alan Turing, the most important thinker in the history of computer science, and that supplied much of the talent (Turing among them) to the World War II code-breaking effort at Bletchley Park that laid the foundation for the modern computer. Indeed, Cambridge University can boast of some of the major achievements in computing history, to such an extent that easy characterizations of the university as “the MIT of Britain” or the town as “the Silicon Valley of the UK” seem slightly condescending. ![]() Cambridge was the heart of the early British PC industry, home of both Sinclair and Acorn as well as many supporting and competing concerns. ![]()
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