Today in 1951, the Nimrod Digital Computer, created by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti, was unveiled to the public at the Exhibition of Science in South Kensington, London, as part of the Festival of Britain. The twelve-by-nine-by-five-foot Nimrod was built specifically to play a game, the game of Nim, as demonstration of Ferranti’s computer design and programming skills.
BBC Radio journalist Paul Jennings reported: “Like everyone else I came to a standstill before the electric brain or, as they prefer to call it, the Nimrod Digital Computer. This looks like a tremendous grey refrigerator…. It’s absolutely frightening…. I suppose at the next exhibition they’ll even have real heaps of matches [which were part of the game] and awful steel arms will come out of the machine to pick them up.”
The parents of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, both worked for Ferranti. Mary Lee Berners-Lee helped set up the Ferranti Mark I, the world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer, at Manchester University.