Engineers gathered like lab-coated druids in Manchester, England over the weekend, not celebrate the Summer Solstice, but to celebrate the birth of what was once the cutting edge of technology, the genesis of the digital computer. Tipping the scales at over a metric tonne, with over 1,500 valves with miles of wires and cables the behemoth electronic beast was more akin to a machine from Shelley's Frankenstein, rather than the world's first digital computer.

"The Baby" as she was affectionately known, bore little, or no resemblance to the machine you are using to read this today, but 60 years ago, on the 21 June The Baby completed its first calculation, spawning the beginning of the computer age.

A replica of the machine, formally called the Small Scale Experimental Machine, has been created and is on view at the city's Museum of Science and Industry. Despite the machine having far less power and capability of a modern day pocket calculator, it represents the foundation of the technology we use today. The first calculation that The Baby completed took 52 minutes. The problem entered was for The Baby to calculate the highest proper factor of 2 to the power of 18—a complicated mathematical problem—but, despite being able to do this, it could not add, or multiply, only subtract!

Though US and German teams had developed single task machines, The Baby was the first computer that could be given different tasks just by changing and reprogramming the computer's memory, a radical development and far quicker than having to re-wire each time from scratch. Instead of using a storage disks the data was kept on a television-like cathode ray tube.

Manchester, during and after the Second World War, was one of the world's leading centers for technology, so much so that Alan Turing, the mathematician responsible for decoding Nazi ciphers at Bletchly Park joined the team of engineers to work in the lab on The Baby's successors, including the Manchester Mk 1, one of the first commercially available computers and a forerunner of the modern PC.

It's laughable today if you thank that the Apple iPod in your pocket can hold over 640 million times more data than the Manchester Baby. The Baby could only hold up to 128 bytes of information and could only complete up to 800 operations per second. Minuscule by today's standards, but nevertheless, it allowed problems to be solved in minutes rather than weeks. In comparison, IBM's state-of-the-art super computer, Road Runner, can perform 1,000 trillion operations per second!

Geoff Tootill, the lone surviving engineer of the three-man team was there to blow out the candles. Happy Birthday Baby.