Ferranti mark 1 alan turing biography

First commercial electronic computer

The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature,^[1] and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd.

It was the world's first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored program digital computer.^[a]

Although preceded as a commercial digital computer by the BINAC and the Z4, the Z4 was electromechanical and lacked software programmability, while BINAC never operated successfully after delivery.^[2]

The Ferranti Mark 1 was "the tidied up and commercialised version of the Manchester Mark I".^[3] The first machine was delivered to the Victoria University of Manchester in February 1951^[4] (publicly demonstrated in July)^[5][6] ahead of the UNIVAC I which was delivered to the United States Census Bureau in late December 1952, having b