Geoffrey Tootill (1922β2017) The engineer this lab is named after #Tootill
Geoff Tootill was born in Chadderton, Lancashire, the only child of Frederick Tootill, a journalist, and his wife Alice (nee Tetlow), a school teacher before her marriage. He grew up in Birmingham, where his father was Midlands manager for the Co-operative Press. Like many boys of the era, he built radio sets and experimented with electronics. He was educated at King Edward's high school, Birmingham, where he excelled in the sciences and won a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge University, to read mathematics.
In order to test the memory Kilburn and Tootill designed an elementary computer, officially known as the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, but better known as "Baby" The computer could store just 32 instructions or numbers using a single cathode ray tube. The Baby first worked in June 1948, taking 52 minutes to find the highest factor of 218, making the Baby the first stored program computer.
The following year, Tootill transferred to Ferranti, the Manchester-based electrical engineering company, to specify a full-scale computer based on the Manchester Mark 1. The first Ferranti Mark I, the world's first commercially available computer, was delivered to the university in 1951.
Later in 1949 Tootill moved to the Military College of Science, where he initiated lectures and lab study on digital computing. During his subsequent service in the Royal Aircraft Establishment he and Stuart Hollingdale wrote "Electronic Computers", Penguin 1965. This paperback ran through eight printings and was translated into Spanish and Japanese. In the International Federation for Information Processing Geoff was Chairman of the drafting committee of its "Vocabulary of Information. Processing", North Holland Publishing Company 1966, on which various national and international standards were based.
From 1963 to 1969 he worked in France, Holland and Germany planning, setting up and directing the Control Centre of the European Space Research Organisation, including its four ground stations. These were located in Belgium, Spitsbergen, Alaska and the Falklands. He then
spent four years as a London civil servant until in 1973 he moved to the National Physical Laboratory, among the executive staff of the European Informatics Network.
After his retirement in 1982 he continued to write programs, including a phonetic algorithm for encoding English names that had over 2,000 corporate users as part of a data matching package developed by his son Steve.
Geoff described his time building the Baby:
When I first arrived in Manchester there were probably a couple of racks with half a dozen or ten chassis units fixed to them. We built up the computer by drawing out circuit diagrams of further units. Tom and I would design an eight valve circuit. Tom would do it in the train on his way to and from Dewsbury, where he was living, I would do it at home... We would screw it into a Post Office rack and connect it up to all the other units, and then start to find out why it wasn't working properly... It was necessary that the apparatus should do something, which we could see was correct, and if it wasn't correct we could mend it until it was correct, at every stage, every chassis that we connected up. Well we went on with this process of adding the units and making the whole lot do something together at every stage, until we got to the stage when we'd made a computer. Tom and I commissioned this last unit and we
laboriously fed in a few binary numbers and switched it on, and we saw the thing had done a computation.
From an audio history recorded by Geoff Tootill.
Geoff Toon (1950
On graduation in 1942, Geoff Tootill was directed into Operational Research in connection with Fighter and Bomber Commands. In 1943 he was transferred to the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) in Malvern to work on radiolocation equipment installed in night fighters. FC Williams and Tom Kilburn were already there, developing novel electronic techniques for use by the rest of the Establishment.
When the war was over, Williams sappointed to the chair of electro-technics at Manchester University. As a result of developments in electronics during the war digital computers had become feasible, and designing a suitable memory technology was the outstanding technical challenge. Williams conceived and designed a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) memory and brought in Kilburn and Tootill to work on its construction and testing.
Geoffrey Tootill (1922β2017) The engineer this lab is named after #Tootill
Geoff Tootill was born in Chadderton, Lancashire, the only child of Frederick Tootill, a journalist, and his wife Alice (nee Tetlow), a school teacher before her marriage. He grew up in Birmingham, where his father was Midlands manager for the Co-operative Press. Like many boys of the era, he built radio sets and experimented with electronics. He was educated at King Edward's high school, Birmingham, where he excelled in the sciences and won a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge University, to read mathematics.
In order to test the memory Kilburn and Tootill designed an elementary computer, officially known as the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, but better known as "Baby" The computer could store just 32 instructions or numbers using a single cathode ray tube. The Baby first worked in June 1948, taking 52 minutes to find the highest factor of 218, making the Baby the first stored program computer.
The following year, Tootill transferred to Ferranti, the Manchester-based electrical engineering company, to specify a full-scale computer based on the Manchester Mark 1. The first Ferranti Mark I, the world's first commercially available computer, was delivered to the university in 1951.
Later in 1949 Tootill moved to the Military College of Science, where he initiated lectures and lab study on digital computing. During his subsequent service in the Royal Aircraft Establishment he and Stuart Hollingdale wrote "Electronic Computers", Penguin 1965. This paperback ran through eight printings and was translated into Spanish and Japanese. In the International Federation for Information Processing Geoff was Chairman of the drafting committee of its "Vocabulary of Information. Processing", North Holland Publishing Company 1966, on which various national and international standards were based.
From 1963 to 1969 he worked in France, Holland and Germany planning, setting up and directing the Control Centre of the European Space Research Organisation, including its four ground stations. These were located in Belgium, Spitsbergen, Alaska and the Falklands. He then
spent four years as a London civil servant until in 1973 he moved to the National Physical Laboratory, among the executive staff of the European Informatics Network.
After his retirement in 1982 he continued to write programs, including a phonetic algorithm for encoding English names that had over 2,000 corporate users as part of a data matching package developed by his son Steve.
Geoff described his time building the Baby:
When I first arrived in Manchester there were probably a couple of racks with half a dozen or ten chassis units fixed to them. We built up the computer by drawing out circuit diagrams of further units. Tom and I would design an eight valve circuit. Tom would do it in the train on his way to and from Dewsbury, where he was living, I would do it at home... We would screw it into a Post Office rack and connect it up to all the other units, and then start to find out why it wasn't working properly... It was necessary that the apparatus should do something, which we could see was correct, and if it wasn't correct we could mend it until it was correct, at every stage, every chassis that we connected up. Well we went on with this process of adding the units and making the whole lot do something together at every stage, until we got to the stage when we'd made a computer. Tom and I commissioned this last unit and we
laboriously fed in a few binary numbers and switched it on, and we saw the thing had done a computation.
From an audio history recorded by Geoff Tootill.
Geoff Toon (1950
On graduation in 1942, Geoff Tootill was directed into Operational Research in connection with Fighter and Bomber Commands. In 1943 he was transferred to the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) in Malvern to work on radiolocation equipment installed in night fighters. FC Williams and Tom Kilburn were already there, developing novel electronic techniques for use by the rest of the Establishment.
When the war was over, Williams sappointed to the chair of electro-technics at Manchester University. As a result of developments in electronics during the war digital computers had become feasible, and designing a suitable memory technology was the outstanding technical challenge. Williams conceived and designed a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) memory and brought in Kilburn and Tootill to work on its construction and testing.