Social Activities

All activities are free to the conference delegates.

Reception

On Monday evening there will be a reception held outside the main conference lecture theatre.

Visit to Museum of Science and Industry (MoSI)

On Tuesday afternoon there will be a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry to see a live demonstration of the "Baby" computer. This is the world's first stored-program electronic digital computer. The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, knickanmed "Baby", was constructed by Tom Kilburn, Freddie Williams and Geoff Tootill, in the University of Manchester (then Victoria Manchester University). It was first successfully operated in June 1948 running a program to factorize 218 (consisting of 17 instructions). This is computer that gave birth to software as it was the first to store program and data in electronic memory. The Baby was a prototype and was quickly followed by the Manchester Mark I.

MoSI has a 100% faithful replica of the Baby, built in 1998 from the original blueprints for the 50th year commemoration. The team that built this replica included a member of the team that build the 1947 original.

Alan Turing, who was also building a computer in London at that time, abandoned his own project to join the University of Manchester as he heard about the success of the Baby. Turing wrote one of the programs for the Baby, a long division algorithm. Later he used the Mark I for his reaction-diffusion simulations. It was also during this time that he wrote his famous paper on the Turing test.

More information about the Baby on the Computer 50 page, Wikipedia and Google's commemorative page (with a short video). See also the History of the Manchester School of Computer Science.

Since not all the participants can see the live demo simultaneously, we will create smaller groups and allocate times for each group prior to arriving at MoSI. We are thankful to the MoSI volunteers that kindly agreed to carry out these demonstrations outside their normal schedule just for CMSB delegates!

photo of the Baby in 1947
The original Baby in 1947.

Conference Dinner

On Tuesday, following the visit to MoSI, there will be a conference dinner for all delegates in the EastZEast Riverside restaurant. The menu includes vegetarian options. Conference dinner is included in the registration fee.