The Small Seeds of Innovation
What was it like in post-war Britain, before the arrival of the modern computer? How, in particular, did organisations carry out calculations and tabulations, analyses and predictions, before high-speed electronics came to their aid? When, in 1948, a small university research group came up with ideas for a new kind of computing machine, why did the government get excited and give the Ferranti engineering company a contract to turn the university prototype into a large production computer capable of solving problems of strategic importance to the nation? In this chapter we describe the seeds of innovation that bore fruit in the Manchester area, starting with a lively interaction between a small group of academics and an unsuspecting electrical engineering company founded seventy years previously. On the way, we cover the history of the Ferranti company and introduce the Ministry of Supply as the government organisation most interested in helping Ferranti take an early lead in computer manufacture.