The illustrated London News
Saturday, June 25, 1949
A calculating machine with a "memory": the control panel, and a storage tube in use.
When Professor Geoffrey Jefferson delivered the Lister Oration at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on June 9, he disclosed that experiments were being conducted at Manchester University with a machine possessing a "memory". As a consequence, a number of misleading reports were published about the machine attributing to it almost human qualities. It is in fact similar to the American Electronic Numeral Integrater and Computer which we illustrated in our issue of November 9, 1946, but mainly differs from it in having a "memory", i.e., it does not have to wait to be told what to do by a human operator when working out a problem, but, by the use of electronic circuits with a delay action, it is able to store a vast quantity of information which automatically takes its proper place in the calculation. This memory-storage system was invented by Professor F.C. Williams, who is seen in our photograph with Dr. Kilburn, feeding a mathematical problem into the machine for solution.
