In February 1951 the first Ferranti Mark 1 was delivered to the University of Manchester, making it the world’s first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer. It was the production version of the Manchester Mark 1, the experimental machine designed by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, built by the firm Ferranti under a government contract; engineers including Geoff Tootill and Alec Robinson improved its speed and instruction set in the process. The details here come from the University of Manchester’s own history of the machine.
The Ferranti Mark 1 matters to the prehistory of artificial intelligence less for its circuitry than for what people did with it. Christopher Strachey ran his draughts-playing program and his love-letter generator on it in 1952, two of the earliest experiments in machine game-playing and computer-generated text. Alan Turing, who wrote a programmer’s handbook for the machine, used it to explore the reaction-diffusion calculations behind his 1952 paper on morphogenesis. In other words, some of the first attempts to make a computer do things associated with thought, creativity, and biological pattern formation happened on this hardware.
The episode shows how quickly the new general-purpose computers were turned toward questions about intelligence and life. Within a year of a commercial machine existing, researchers were already using it to test whether games, language, and the patterns of living things could be reduced to computation.
For a general reader, the Ferranti Mark 1 is a reminder that the moment programmable computers became real, people immediately began asking whether they could think, and started running experiments to find out.