For a really interesting day out over the Christmas holidays why not visit the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) and meet the Baby?

The Baby, or the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was the world's first Stored-Program Computer that operated successfully for the first time on 21 June 1948 at the University of Manchester.

Amazingly it was built using technology developed during World War II for radar and communications equipment!

It has less computing power than a modern day calculator and yet it's 5.2 metres long, 2.2 metres high and weighs one tonne!

It was built by Frederic C Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Toothill as an engineering test bed for the Williams tube. This was effectively a memory device for computing purposes using a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) of the same type used in radar as a way of displaying electronic signals on a screen that you can see. It is also known as the Williams-Kilburn Storage Tube. It worked when elements on the screen were excited by electrons and became charged. Each area of stored charge was made to represent a binary digit, either a 1 or a 0.

Tom Kilburn worked on the CRT memory and within a year had progressed from having one bit of storage data to about 2,000. Now they needed a machine that could test this capability at electronic computing speeds and the first Small Scale Experimental Machine was designed and built. It didn't work at first but eventually it fired up, suddenly stopped, and there in the expected line was the expected answer. They had constructed a computing machine. The Baby had become the first computer to run a program electronically stored in its memory.

Although the original Baby no longer exists the machine on show is a replica that was constructed by members of the original team in 1996.

The Baby is demonstrated every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between 10:00 and 15:00 and is operated by experienced volunteers. More information can be found on the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) website. Visitors are advised to call the museum to check demonstrations on 0161 832 2244 if making a special trip to see the Baby working.