Later Developments
Tootill was temporarily transferred from the University of Manchester to Ferranti in August 1949 to continue work on the Ferranti Mark 1's design, and spent four months working with the company. The Manchester Mark 1 was dismantled and scrapped towards the end of 1950, replaced a few months later by the first Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.
Between 1946 and 1949 the average size of the design team working on the Mark 1 and its predecessor, the SSEM, had been about four people. During that time 34 patents were taken out based on the team's work, either by the Ministry of Supply or by its successor, the National Research Development Corporation. In July 1949 IBM invited Williams to the United States on an all-expenses-paid trip to discuss the Mark 1's design. The company subsequently licensed several of the patented ideas developed for the machine, including the Williams tube, in the design of its own 701 and 702 computers. The most significant design legacy of the Manchester Mark 1 was perhaps its incorporation of index registers, the patent for which was taken out in the names of Williams, Kilburn, Tootill, and Newman.
Kilburn and Williams concluded that computers would be used more in scientific roles than pure maths, and decided to develop a new machine that would include a floating point unit. Work began in 1951, and the resulting machine, which ran its first program in May 1954, was known as Meg, or the megacycle machine. It was smaller and simpler than the Mark 1, and much faster for maths problems. Ferranti produced a version of Meg with the Williams tubes replaced by the more reliable core memory, marketed as the Ferranti Mercury.
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