Ferranti Mark 1

Ferranti Mark 1
AKA: Manchester Electronic Computer
AKA: Manchester Ferranti
1951
This was a PC for sale to the public and people bought it. The University of Manchester bought the first unit ever manufactured. It was capable of music. It could fit in a _small_ room or large walk-in closet; basically it was built into a massive desk 12 cubic meters in volume. It beat the UNIVAC to market by 4 months. And, it had a games!

Checkers
Chess (by Dr. Dietrich Prinz)
Turochamp(Mate-in-two) (by David Champernowne and !Alan Turing!) Alan Turing was 'porting' a computer game to the Ferranti Mark 1 when he died. I say 'porting' because he initially wrote the game for a theoretical computer that existed only on paper and in mind. He would use a real chess board and the code on paper to play against humans by stepping through papered code (kinda like D&D with miniatures). Moves calculated by Turing using the program took at least 30 minutes. The Pilot ACE and a few other real computers were based on Turing's theoretical computer design. But the Ferranti Mark 1 was the first computer that Turing felt was capable of running Turochamp. Initially it failed to run on the Ferranti Mark 1 for lack of memory but he continued working on. After he died, David Champernowne finished Turing's port. This was however, a reduced port with such things as castling removed entirely from the algorithm. As it was reduced, this was not the Turing Engine. Turing was also porting Machiavelli, a rival chess program by Donald Michie and Shaun Wylie for the same theoretical computer design. The work on Machiavelli was never completed? In 2004 Mathias Feist was the first to fully code the Turing Engine on a computer. When he tried to reproduce the only game ever recorded of the "paper machine" against a human player, the engine deviated from the original game. Feist searched for the mistake he had made until a colleague of Turing suggested that the bug was not in the code and was instead in Alan Turing. It was eventually determined that Turing had tired (after the first 15 hours) and slipped up in some arithmetic or had even selected a different tree than the engine had. The Turing engine can be played without slip ups using Fritz. Kasparov says the engine makes "decent moves" and can beat amateurs. It in fact does.