2009's major milestone for computing pioneers

Next year marks the 60th anniversaries of two landmark UK contributions to business computing history. The Manchester Mark 1, pictured above, and Edsac computers both became fully operational in 1949.

Scientists working at the British universities of Manchester and Cambridge developed the machines, which are remarkable for notching up several computing firsts.

The Manchester Mark 1, for example, was to become the first machine to use a type of index register, improving program and memory efficiency. It was also the system on which Autocode, one of the first high-level languages, was later developed.

Photograph © The University of Manchester 1998, 1999