What Came Next

We pick up Chap. 2’s story of the first Ferranti Mark I at Manchester University. In 1954 this machine was moved to a large new Department of Electrical Engineering, to which end-users such as the Meteorological Office came to run their programs. Meanwhile, collaboration between the University and Ferranti continued in the design of new high-performance computers and their software—notably Autocodes. The high point in this collaboration was the Ferranti Atlas which, in 1962, briefly became the most powerful computer in the world. We describe the subsequent fortunes of Ferranti Ltd. and the eventual demise of the company’s computer manufacturing endeavours. We end with a review of surviving artefacts from the nine Mark I and Mark I* computers, indicating the museums where bit can be found today. Finally, there are plans for software simulators.