One Tonne Machine

Nowadays we carry flash drives, mobiles and several miniature devices with memory. But, know what, the first machine to contain memory to store a program was the "Small scale experimental machine" popularly called "Baby". The computer was a one room sized one and it was described as the “First Modern PC”. The first program that was executed was to find the highest factor of a number. This took place on 21 June 1948.It is to be noted that "baby" was the successor of ENIAC and UK’s Colossus. ENIAC was built to calculate the trajectory of shells for the US army, while Colossus was used to decrypt messages from the German High Command during World War II. The memory of the "baby" was built from cathode ray tube that could be used to store a program. The information was stored in the form of binary using charges on the CRT screen. Logic '1' was represented by a positive charge and logic '0' was represented by a negative charge.