Attempting a historical study of the early British electronic computers and it's making me want to invest in a corkboard, pins and strings to keep track of everything.
I've spent the last several days alone trying to get a straight answer on whether the Manchester Baby (and subsequently, Manchester Mark 1) was derived from the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC / EDVAC itself.
I thought I read that Manchester received a copy of the report, though I don't have the source for that on hand so I'm not going to put too much weight on that. I'll update if I find it.
A representative working on behalf of Max Newman was present at the Moore School Lectures. Thus we know the Manchester team was at least exposed to design concepts from the EDVAC.
In Automatic Digital Computers (1956), Maurice Wilkes (inventor of the very-much-derived-from-the-First Draft EDSAC) offhandedly groups the Manchester computers together "with other machines of the EDVAC-type". Unclear to me is whether he's using that as shorthand for stored program computers, or pointing to a stronger thread of influence.
Finally, University of Manchester itself has this to say:
A second U.K. project, the Manchester Mark 1, was not directly influenced by the lectures, but Freddie Williams, while visiting a number of places in the US in June 1946, saw the ENIAC, and he was impressed at the evidence that such a large electronic machine could be kept error free for long enough to make useful calculations.
Followed by this a few paragraphs later:
Williams and Kilburn immediately wanted to develop a basic computer as the only way of fully testing their proposed storage mechanism. Tom Kilburn led the design and construction, and the "Small Scale Experimental Machine", the Manchester "Baby", was up and running by June 1948. Although small and primitive, it was the first working machine to have all the basic ingredients we would regard as essential to the von Neumann computer, in particular it had a true Random Access Memory and used the stored-program principle. The Baby so successfully demonstrated the effectiveness and potential of the von Neumann computer that Williams immediately embarked on developing the Baby into a full-sized usable machine, the Manchester Mark 1 [...]
Making the rather circular (IMO) case that the Baby / Mark 1 was both unrelated to the EDVAC, but related to the "von Neumann computer", which itself was the "idealized" form of the EDVAC laid out in the First Draft. (And yes, I know the reasoning for this is likely the IAS Machines using the same Williams Tube memory as the Manchester machines, but it's still weird to see it framed this way.) I feel like I'm going nuts, which is only bolstered by the ever-growing list of early British computer history books I'm compiling.
