Electronic Digital Computers

A SMALL electronic digital computing machine has been operating successfully for some weeks in the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory, which is at present housed in the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Manchester. The machine is purely experimental, and is on too small a scale to be of mathematical value. It was built primarily to test the soundness of the storage principle employed and to permit experience to be gained with this type of machine before embarking on the design of a full-size machine. However, apart from its small size, the machine is, in principle, 'universal' in the sense that it can be used to solve any problem that can be reduced to a programme of elementary instructions ; the programme can be changed without any mechanical or electro-mechanical circuit changes.