Ferranti Atlas: Britain's first supercomputer

Ferranti Atlas: Britain's first supercomputer: http://youtu.be/6TRfy70DqD8 via YouTube

Fifty years ago today, the the U.K.'s first supercomputer, the Ferranti Atlas, was switched on. For a time, it was the most powerful computer in the world, and some claimed that when it first arrived in 1962, it roughly doubled the U.K.’s scientific computing capability.

Many of the software concepts Atlas pioneered are still in use today—in particular, virtual memory and multi-tasking, which enable the computer to work on multiple programs at once. The program controlling this, called Atlas supervisor, has been described as the “most significant breakthrough in the history of operating systems," with virtual memory the most widely used computer design development of the past 50 years. Find out more about the Ferranti Atlas in this short film we produced for the 50th anniversary, or on the Europe blog: http://goo.gl/XhLsf