The World's first electronic computer

The world's first practical digital information processing machine was Colossus built by Tommy Flowers of The Post Office research department and installed at Bletchley Park in December 1943. This was the world's first electronic computer and was used to crack German codes during the Second World War. It's existence was kept Secret until the 1970s.

See Bletchley Park

The Manchester Baby (70th Anniversary)

A group at Manchester University built the Small-Scale Experimental machine - better known as the Manchester Baby. It worked on the 21st June 1948.

The first time, anywhere in the world, that a program stored in an electronic memory was executed and completed.

The Baby showed how one computer could, through running different programs, do different jobs. This is what makes it so critically important in computing's evolution.

ITNOW,Summer 2018, Martin Cooper MBCS

The World's first Business Computer

J. Lyons, a British catering company, best known for it's tea shops and cakes designed and built the first business computer from scratch.

Leo Computer Society

The computer in your mobile phone

ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics such as the majority of mobile phones, digital media players, electronic games, PDAs etc. They account for approximately 90% of all embedded 32bit Risc processors. Over 16 million are sold every day. ARM was developed by ARM Holdings of Cambridge and was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes, the successor to the BBC Micro.

Britain at the forefront of Computer technology..

The Raspberry pi: an ARM GNU/Linux computer for £26

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It's a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video.It was developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. They want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Over eleven million Raspberyy Pis have been shipped from the Pencoed factory in South Wales.

24th June 2019 - Raspberry Pi 4 is now on sale. For the first time we provide a PC-like level of performance for most users. Find out more here.

Apple uses new ARM based chip in new devices

The first computers with Apple's M1 chip are already up for purchase.

22 June 2020: Apple has confirmed it will transition its Mac laptop and desktop computers to its own ARM-based processors. The move means that Macs will run on the same type of chips as the firm's iPhones and iPads, rather than Intel's. ARM-based chips are based on the designs of the UK-based company, which is headquartered in Cambridge. Other companies then adapt these to add capabilities of their own.

Raspberry Pi 400 - A whole computer in a keyboard

The 2020 version of the Raspberry Pi is contained in a keyboard. Just connect it to a monitor and a mouse and you are ready to go. The £67 device - or £95 with a mouse and cables - may help answer the challenge of getting cheap computing to youngsters and older people.

"It gets into your life as a utility device, as a thing that you buy to do your schoolwork, surf the Internet or play games on" explains the organisation's founder Eben Upton.

But Eben Upton is clear about the audience this product is really aimed at. "Seven hundred thousand kids got sent home from school in March without a PC," he explains. "This is a machine for anyone who needs a PC. And there's one thing we've learned this year - there are still vast numbers in society who need a PC."

The Free Software Movement

There is a growing movement in the world that believes computer users should not be at the mercy of large global corporations. This movement does not have a large marketing budget and is largely ignored by the media who depend for their livelihood on advertising revenue. Even the BBC fails to cover it. See the Software page for more information.

The Open Hardware Movement

RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that began in 2010 and is based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. Unlike most other ISA designs, RISC-V is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. A number of companies are offering or have announced RISC-V hardware, open source operating systems with RISC-V support are available, and the instruction set is supported in several popular software toolchains. See the Wikipedia entry here