to benefit the company persuaded the Science Research Council (SRC) to assist the project by awarding the university a £630,000 grant over a five-year period.

It was a fruitful collaboration. However, an initial failure by International Computers Limited (ICL) (which by then had merged with ICT) to acknowledge the extent to which the MU5 had influenced their 2900 series concerned the SRC, outraged Kilburn, and led to a long-running dispute that was not fully settled until after Kilburn’s retirement in 1981.

Retirement

In order to spend more time with his wife, Kilburn retired early at age 60. Unfortunately, Irene Kilburn died just two weeks before his planned retirement. 1 After that, he continued to spend one day each month in his old department, but the majority of his time was spent with his son and daughter, gardening, playing the piano, and following the Manchester United Football Club. He died in Manchester, U.K., in January 2001.

 

References

1. Anderson, D.P. An interview with Maurice Wilkes.

Commun. ACM 52, 9 (Feb. 2009), 39–42.

2. Anderson, D.P. Max Newman: Forgotten man of early British computing. Commun. ACM 56, 5 (May 2013),

29–31.

3. Anderson, D.P. Patrick Blackett: Providing ‘white heat’ to the British computing revolution. Commun. ACM 56,

12 (Dec. 2013), 26–28.

4. Anderson, D.P. The contribution of M. H. A. Newman and his mathematicians to the creation of the Manchester ‘Baby’. The British Society for the History of Mathematics Bulletin 24, 1 (2009), 27–39.

5. Anderson, D.P. Was the Manchester Baby conceived at Bletchley Park? In Proceedings of the Electronic Workshops Computing, British Computer Society, 2007; http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_ paper3.pdf.

6. Bowker, G. and Giordano, R. Interview with Tom Kilburn. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, 5

(1993), 17–32.

7. Ibbett, R.N. The University of Manchester MU5

project. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 21, 1

(Jan. 1999), 24–33.

8. Kilburn, T. From cathode ray tube to Ferranti Mark I resurrection. Resurrection: The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society 1, 2 (Feb. 1990), 16–20.

9. Kilburn, T. et al. A system design proposal. IFIP Congress 2 (1968), 806–811.

10. Lavington, S. H. A History of Manchester Computers,

2nd ed., British Computer Society, 1998.

11. Lavington, S.H. The Manchester Mark I and Atlas: A historical perspective. Commun. ACM 21, 1 (Jan.

1978), 4–12.

12. Morris, D. Early computers at Manchester University.

Computer Resurrection 1, 4 (1992).

13. Wilkes, M. and Kahn, H. J. Tom Kilburn CBE FREng. 11 August 1921–17 January 2001. Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society. The Royal Society of London (2003), 283–297.

 

David Anderson ( [e-mail]) is the Ci TECH Research Centre Director at the School of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth, U. K.

Copyright held by Author.

new Department of Computer Science, the first of its kind in the U.K. The intention was to provide a natural home for computer research, a sound base for future projects, and undergraduate courses in computer science. Kilburn, now translated into a professor of computer science, was the inaugural head of department, and had 12 academic staff under him. Directly reflecting Kilburn’s personal strengths and his professional experience, Manchester placed more emphasis on hardware than many of the other computer science departments that followed it, most of which sprang from a mathematical lineage rather from engineering. Kilburn went on to serve as the dean of the Faculty of Science from 1970 to 1972 and pro vice chancellor between 1976 and 1979.

MU5

In 1966, Kilburn embarked on what was to be his last major computing project: the MU5. The Atlas had been operational for four years, and the MU5’s main focus was to provide a computer architecture geared toward the efficient running of programs written in high-level languages. The MU5 was conceived as a range of three machines—a small inexpensive computer, a high-spec scientific computer with 20 times the throughput of the Atlas, and a multiprocessor—but only the second was actually developed. 12 The MU5’s original design proposal was set out in 1968 at the Edinburgh International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) conference in a paper authored jointly by Kilburn, Derrick Morris, Jeff Rohl, and Frank Sumner. 7, 9

An interesting technical aspect of the MU5 was the associative name store in which frequently used scalar variables would automatically reside in a fast cache store. Morris explained, “This was as a result of an analysis of the Atlas software, especially the instruction code. We learnt something about the frequency of use of operands and control structures. The order code accommodated string functions and vector functions.” 12

The university secured the cooperation of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), which made construction facilities available at cost and provided five staff to work on the project. The university’s relationship with ICT and the potential it created