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Tom Kilburn Facts & Worksheets

Tom Kilburn was an English computer scientist and mathematician. He made significant contributions throughout his productive 30-year career.

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Tom Kilburn was an English computer scientist and mathematician. He made significant contributions throughout his productive 30-year career. Kilburn was considered to be one of the preeminent figures in the early history of computer designs.

See the fact file below for more information on the Tom Kilburn or alternatively, you can download our 25-page Tom Kilburn worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

BIOGRAPHY

  • Tom Kilburn was born in West Yorkshire, England, on August 11, 1921. John William Kilburn, his father, worked as a statistical clerk and later became a company secretary.
  • Kilburn attended Wheelwright Grammar School for his specialized education. He was permitted by the headmaster to study almost nothing else at the age of 14. After attending school, he grew as a mathematical specialist.
  • For his college degree, Kilburn attended Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge in 1940, and he was offered several scholarships. In 1942, he graduated with First Class Honors in Part I of the Mathematical Tripos and the preliminary examination.
  • Several Cambridge mathematics experts were serving at Bletchley Park during World War II. Despite this, the mathematical community remained active, and Kilburn took part completely.
  • Kilburn was appointed to be the Sidney Sussex College representative in the New Pythagoreans (a Cambridge University mathematical society). He encountered many people who helped in the development of computing.

KILBURN AT WAR

  • During Kilburn’s final year at Cambridge, he attended a talk by C.P. Snow, who talked about recruiting people for unspecified war work. Supposedly, Kilburn would have joined the RAF as a pilot. However, his rank was lowered to a navigator. Kilburn did not like the idea because he wanted to be in charge.
  • Instead, Kilburn spent his time enrolling in several short courses in electronics and magnetism during the war. He was appointed to the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) in Malvern, where he was included in Group 19, which was led by F. C. Williams.
  • The group did not welcome Kilburn enthusiastically. Williams requested an extra person to join his group, and Kilburn was the one they sent. According to Group 19, they did not want a person who was not practically experienced and who had no interest in electronics and electronics equipment.

KILBURN: THE MANCHESTER BABY

  • When the Second World War ended, Kilburn was well settled. He was married to Irene Marsden in 1943. Professionally, even though he had an unfavorable beginning, he became a significant member of Williams’ team.
  • Kilburn became the acting scientific officer. Williams left TRE and took up the Edward Stocks Massey Chair of Electro-technics at the Victoria University of Manchester. Williams intended to continue his work on developing the cathode ray tube (CRT) memory, and he arranged for Kilburn to work with him.
  • In 1947, Kilburn and Williams developed a CRT that could store patterns over long periods of time. However, Kilburn stated that the only way to test if the CRT system worked was to build a computer.
  • Kilburn started to develop the Manchester Baby. It is a small-scale experimental machine that was considered as the first electronic stored-program computer. On June 21, 1948, the Manchester Baby ran its first program.
  • The machine was the first working example of a digital electronic stored-program computer. It was not highly iconic, but the Manchester Baby laid the foundations and led to promising developments in the computer science field.

KILBURN: MARK I AND MAR II (MERCURY)

  • Kilburn intended to return to TRE after the Manchester Baby was completed. However, the Baby’s success was so significant that the Ministry of Supply quickly awarded them to design and build a full-scale commercial computer under Williams’ specifications.
  • Williams knew that Kilburn had a vital role in the project. That is why Williams offered Kilburn a lecturing position to persuade him to remain at the university to work on the prototype.
  • The first crucial step was to develop a prototype machine. It was called the Manchester Mark I. The machine was extended to a full-size computer. The two major features of the machine were the two-level store and instruction modification registers. Additionally, the Manchester Mark I had a magnetic back-up drum store to provide a random-access secondary storage device.
  • After the Baby was completed, further computer developments required engineers rather than mathematicians to be the lead. Kilburn gained control of further developments in the computer field.
  • In 1951, after developing significant work, Kilburn quickly began working on the Mark II computer. It was also known as the megacycle machine, or Meg. The Meg replaced the Mark I valve diodes with a solid-state version and offered a tenfold increase in clock rate that greatly improved the reliability and floating-point operation. In Mark I, the CRT memory was not compatible with the Meg, which led Kilburn to design a 10-bit parallel CRT memory.
  • Meg successfully operated in 1954, and Ferranti developed the commercial version name of Mercury.

KILBURN: TRANSISTOR COMPUTERS

  • After developing the Meg, Kilburn led a Manchester design team that included Dai Edwards, Tommy Thomas, Dick Grimsdale, and Douglas Webb in developing the smallest possible economic computer.
  • Kilburn and his team learned that it is possible to use transistors in building the machine. Two prototype transistor computers were commissioned that both used a pseudo-two-address instruction format and permitted optimum programming.
  • A 48-bit machine was produced in November of 1953 that was also widely acknowledged to be the world’s first operational transistor computer. By April of 1955, an enhanced version of the computer was developed, having 1,300 diodes and 200 point-contact transistors.

KILBURN: MUSE AND ATLAS

  • Kilburn planned to develop a large, fast machine that would make full use of both existing and emerging technology. The project was called the Muse (microsecond) project.
  • The Muse used multiprogramming, spooling, job scheduling, interleaved storage, pipelining, autonomous transfer units, and virtual storage. The machine was considered comparable in scope and ambition to the IBM Stretch and Univac LARC projects.
  • Kilburn knew that the Department of Electrical Engineering had sufficient resources available to support the project. However, the government and Ferranti initially declined the Muse proposal.
  • Fortunately, Ferranti and NRDR participated in the project that was renamed as Atlas. Atlas has an innovative program called the supervisor managed drum transfers. It is a one-level-store concept with a fast and slow store that appears as a single fast store and a significant precursor to virtual memory.
  • Kilburn was the one who managed the project and took part in designing the circuit.

KILBURN: MU5

  • In 1996, the MU5 was Kilburn’s last major computing project. The main goal of the MU5 was to provide computer architecture that will be efficient in running programs written in high-level languages.
  • The MU5 was described as a range of three machines – a small, inexpensive computer; a high-spec scientific computer with 20 times the Atlas’ throughput; and a multiprocessor.
  • Another significant aspect of the MU5 is its associative name store that uses a scalar variable that automatically resides in a fast cache-store.

Tom Kilburn Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Tom Kilburn across 25 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Tom Kilburn worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Tom Kilburn who was an English computer scientist and mathematician. He made significant contributions throughout his productive 30-year career. Kilburn was considered to be one of the preeminent figures in the early history of computer designs.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Tom Kilburn Facts
  • Kilburn’s Profiling
  • Timeline of the Scientist
  • Kilburn’s Missing Words
  • Then VS Now
  • The Five Computers
  • The Jumbled Computer
  • Mark I and Mark II
  • Find the Key
  • The Questions of Kilburn
  • Kilburn’s Analysis

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Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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