Before we begin — Manchester, Rochdale, Salford, and most of what we’re about to discuss were, until 1974, part of Lancashire. Just so that’s on the record. The Red Rose county’s contribution to computing is, it turns out, considerable.
On the morning of 21 June 1948, at the Victoria University of Manchester, a machine called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine ran its first program. The program, written by Tom Kilburn, consisted of 17 instructions. Its task was to find the highest factor of a given number. It took 52 minutes and 3.5 million calculations to find the answer.
In those 52 minutes, everything changed. The Manchester Baby — as the SSEM was nicknamed — was the first computer in history to store and execute a program held entirely in its own electronic memory. Not on paper tape. Not hardwired in. In its memory, the way every computer and phone and games console works today. It was, as the Science and Industry Museum on Liverpool Road puts it, the birth of modern computing. And it happened in Manchester.
Thirty-five years later, in a bedroom somewhere in the Manchester area, a teenager called Nigel Alderton wrote Chuckie Egg. You probably know the one. The little man in the hat collecting eggs while ostriches walked around platforms. It was published in 1983, ported to virtually every home computer of the era, and is still talked about with genuine affection by anyone who grew up with an 8-bit machine. In 2026, the Guardian ran a long interview with Alderton about making it. “In my mind it was just tall birds wandering around on platforms,” he told them.
From the Baby to Chuckie Egg. From the foundations of modern computing to one of the most beloved British games of the 8-bit era. Manchester’s contribution to computing is one of the most remarkable in the world — and it barely gets the credit it deserves.
The Baby and the Men Who Built It
Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn had spent the Second World War perfecting radar technology at the Telecommunications Research Establishment. When the war ended, Williams was appointed head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Manchester University and brought Kilburn with him. The knowledge they’d accumulated working on cathode ray tube technology for radar became the foundation for something entirely new — a way of storing information electronically that would make the modern computer possible.
The Williams-Kilburn Tube, as the memory device came to be known, used a cathode ray tube to store binary data. The cathode ray tube — the same technology that powered television sets and radar displays — was designed to produce images by firing electrons at a phosphorescent screen. It was a precision piece of manufacturing; people spent careers making them. My dad used to make those. So did I, one summer holiday. Using one as a memory device required an entirely different application of the same principle: rather than displaying images, Williams realised that the electrostatic charges left by the electron beam could be used to represent binary data. It was the world’s first truly random-access electronic memory, and the leap from television screen to computer memory was not obvious. It took someone who had spent years working with the technology to see it. Sixteen other early computer projects worldwide would go on to use it before it was eventually superseded by ferrite core memory.
The Baby itself was, as Freddie Williams later described it, deliberately small and primitive — a testbed to prove the concept rather than a practical computing machine. But when it worked, when the spots on the display tube “stopped their mad dance” and showed the correct answer, Williams knew immediately what it meant. “Nothing was ever the same again,” he said.
Within months, work had begun on the Manchester Mark 1 — a full-scale practical computer based on the Baby. That in turn became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, delivered to Manchester University in 1951 and widely regarded as the first commercially produced general-purpose computer.
Manchester had, in the space of three years, invented modern computing and commercialised it. A working replica of the Baby sits in the Science and Industry Museum today. It’s worth an afternoon of anyone’s time.
Alan Turing’s Manchester Years
Alan Turing is most commonly associated with Bletchley Park and the codebreaking work that shortened the Second World War. Less discussed are his Manchester years, which were arguably his most intellectually fertile.
Turing joined Manchester University in 1948 — the same year the Baby ran its first program — as a Reader in Mathematics, and became Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory. It was in Manchester that he proposed the Turing Test, the theoretical framework for measuring machine intelligence that remains the benchmark for discussions of artificial intelligence nearly 80 years later. It was in Manchester that he worked on mathematical biology, producing theories about how patterns form in nature — the spots on a cheetah, the spirals in a sunflower — that have since been confirmed experimentally.
Turing died in Manchester in 1954. He is commemorated with a statue in Sackville Park in the city centre — fittingly, close to the Gay Village — and the Alan Turing building at the university. The building that houses the Computer Science department is on Oxford Road, a short walk from where the Baby ran its first program. The continuity is unbroken.
The decades that followed saw computing move from university basements to commercial offices, from room-sized machines to something more portable and affordable. IBM defined the mainframe era. The minicomputer arrived in the 1960s, the microprocessor in the 1970s. Manchester’s university remained at the forefront of research throughout — but the broader story was shifting toward something that would eventually reach every household.
In 1977, the Apple II and the TRS-80 launched in America. In 1981, the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum arrived in Britain. A £125 computer that any household could buy, with a manual that taught you to program it and a keyboard you could plug into your television. The technology Kilburn and Williams built in a basement in 1948 had, thirty-three years later, become something a teenager in Rochdale could get for Christmas and spend a Saturday teaching himself BASIC from a ring-bound manual.
Ocean Software and the Dungeon on Central Street
Jump forward to 1983. David Ward and Jon Woods were two Manchester entrepreneurs who had been running a youth clothing line. When that folded, they spotted an opportunity in the rapidly expanding home computer games market and started a mail-order games business they initially called Spectrum Games. Their early catalogue was, not to put too fine a point on it, mostly knock-off versions of arcade games advertised in the back of gaming magazines before the games had actually been made — they tested the market, then commissioned bedroom coders to build what they’d sold. In true Manchester fashion, they got away with it.
Renamed Ocean Software, the company set up in the basement and second floor of a Quaker meeting house on Central Street in Manchester city centre. This small, unglamorous space — known internally as “the dungeon” — became one of the most productive addresses in European gaming. From Central Street came RoboCop, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Chase HQ, Wizball, Head Over Heels, and hundreds of other titles across every platform of the era. The Ocean loader music — that synth tune that played on the Commodore 64 while games loaded from tape — is still instantly recognisable to anyone who owned a C64 in the 1980s. Martin Galway composed the most famous versions. Some things don’t leave you.
RoboCop came with a licensed light gun peripheral — technically impressive, practically unreliable. The gun’s accuracy was, shall we say, optimistic. If you got it for Christmas and found yourself shooting at completely the wrong part of the screen, you were not alone and it almost certainly wasn’t your aim. Daley Thompson’s Decathlon had a different problem entirely: completing the 100 metres required waggling the joystick faster than most human beings could physically manage. Controllers were broken. Fingers were blistered. Wrists were questioned. Nobody who owned a C64 in the mid-1980s finished that decathlon without consequence — or without wondering whether their joystick was faulty, their technique was wrong, or Daley himself was simply operating at a level of physical capability the rest of us could never reach. Ocean knew exactly what they were doing. The games sold because they were events, not just software.
Ocean absorbed their Liverpool rivals Imagine Software in 1984 and grew into one of the biggest games publishers in Europe, eventually being acquired by Infogrames in 1996. David Ward, its co-founder, passed away recently. He was 75.
Nigel Alderton and the Tall Birds
Nigel Alderton grew up in Manchester — born in Newcastle but moved to the city at age two, and has since returned. His entry into computing followed a path familiar to anyone who grew up in Britain in the early 1980s. His first computer was a ZX81. He worked through the Sinclair BASIC manual — ring-bound, lying flat, with a tutorial that started with lines like LET eggs = 61. PRINT “The price of eggs is “; eggs. That line of code is, in a very real sense, the seed of Chuckie Egg.
At 15, Alderton got a Saturday job at A&F Software — the Rochdale company that would eventually publish the game — fetching bacon butties for the programmers, duplicating tapes, and helping out generally for £7 a day. After a few months he told them he was writing a game himself. “All the programmers there had games published themselves and I was just the kid who made the tea,” he recalled later, “so they were mildly amused by my request.”
Chuckie Egg appeared in 1983 for the BBC Micro and was rapidly ported to the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Electron, and others. Zzap!64 gave it 93%. It appeared in multiple “best games ever” lists over the following decades and still does.
What Alderton told the Guardian in 2026 is characteristic of the best stories from that era. On why the enemies look the way they do: “I needed enemies to be two characters high and one character wide, and that dictated how they looked. You had to keep it simple – you didn’t want a complicated shape.” The ostriches were ostriches because the hardware said they had to be that size and that shape, and ostriches fit. The game existed because he made it, alone, in a bedroom, because home computers had made that possible for the first time in history. The same creative conditions that produced the Baby — technically gifted people working with limited resources on problems they’d defined themselves — produced Chuckie Egg. Manchester has a type.
The Machines That Made It Possible
None of this happens without the home computers. The BBC Micro, launched in 1981 as part of the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project, put a genuinely capable machine into schools and homes across Britain. Its 6502 processor, structured BASIC, and relatively advanced sound hardware made it both a serious educational tool and a surprisingly capable games machine. It was expensive — around £300 at launch — but it was the machine that most directly connected the university computing tradition to the bedroom coding era. Nigel Alderton wrote Chuckie Egg on it first.
The ZX Spectrum, launched the same year at a fraction of the price, democratised access. At £125 for the 16K model, it put a programmable computer within reach of households that couldn’t stretch to a BBC Micro. Its limitations — the rubber keys, the colour clash, the beeper — became part of its character. Thousands of developers learned to code on Spectrums precisely because the constraints forced creativity.
Across the Atlantic, the TRS-80 from Tandy/Radio Shack had been doing something similar since 1977 — an affordable home computer sold through high street electronics shops, introducing a generation of Americans to programming before the Apple II or the IBM PC defined the market. The TRS-80 never had the cultural impact in Britain that the Spectrum or BBC Micro did, but its existence as part of the same global wave matters to the story.
We’ll cover all of these — the BBC Micro, Spectrum, Commodore 64, TRS-80, Amstrad CPC and more — in a dedicated piece on the machines that built the home computing era. For now, it’s enough to note that without them, there’s no bedroom coding scene, no Ocean Software, no Chuckie Egg. The hardware made the culture possible.
The Thread That Connects Them
There’s an argument to be made — and it’s not a fanciful one — that the Baby, Turing’s work in Manchester, Ocean Software, and Chuckie Egg are all expressions of the same thing. A culture of practical ingenuity, of making things work with what’s available, of not being particularly impressed by received wisdom about what’s possible.
Kilburn and Williams didn’t have the resources of a major government lab. They had expertise from radar work, a university basement, and a problem they knew how to solve. Alderton didn’t have a development team or a publisher’s advance. He had a home computer and an idea about tall birds. Ward and Woods didn’t have gaming experience or coding knowledge. They had a sharp eye for a market and the confidence to advertise games before they’d been made.
Manchester has always done this. The industrial revolution started here, in the mills and factories of Ancoats and Salford. The Hallé Orchestra was founded here in 1858, the world’s oldest professional symphony orchestra. The Haçienda ran parallel to the early PC gaming era — Factory Records, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, the Madchester scene — a different kind of creativity from the same city, the same DIY spirit, different outputs entirely.
The Science and Industry Museum on Liverpool Road sits on the site of the world’s first passenger railway station. It houses the Baby replica, exhibits on the industrial revolution, and the story of Manchester’s extraordinary contribution to human progress. It’s free to enter. If you’re ever in the city and care about computing, games, or both — it’s an afternoon well spent.
And if you want to go further — to actually sit down and play the machines — the North West Computer Museum in Leigh (Lancashire, naturally) is one of the best things in the region. Based on the fourth floor of the Grade II listed Leigh Spinners Mill, it has 80+ working exhibits from the 1970s to the present day, a retro arcade section, Raspberry Pi workshops, a VR suite, and a café. Run by Joe and Helen Kay with obvious passion, it’s the kind of place that makes you stay much longer than you planned. Open Wednesday to Sunday, £7 entry. The Vintage Computer Festival GB 2026 is being held there on 19-21 June — worth putting in the diary.
You can support the museum via Patreon, JustGiving, or the original 2021 Crowdfunder. Worth doing.
Nigel Alderton is from Manchester. The first stored-programme computer ran in Manchester. The loader music that soundtracked your C64 gaming was written in Manchester. Not bad for a city that, as far as most of the world is concerned, is mainly famous for two football clubs and the rain.
Manchester (The County of Lancashire, d. 1974)
A note on geography before we finish. Manchester was Lancashire until 1974, when the Local Government Act created Greater Manchester as a new metropolitan county. The Red Rose county lost its industrial heartland by administrative reorganisation. The spirit didn’t move with the boundary.
And it was never really about where you were from. It was about where you were at.
Kilburn was from Dewsbury. Williams was from the Black Country. Turing was born in London. They came to Manchester because the university was there and the work could happen there. Friedrich Engels arrived from Germany in 1842 and found in Ancoats the conditions that would eventually produce his most significant writing. That is what this place has always been — not a birthplace, but a destination. A place you come to when you have something to make and need room to make it.
The cotton mill workers understood this. Their backs built the wealth of the British Empire. And in the winter of 1862, facing destitution when the American Civil War cut off their cotton supply, six thousand of them gathered at the Free Trade Hall and voted to support Lincoln and the Union cause anyway. They refused to demand their cotton back if it meant endorsing slavery. Lincoln wrote to them on 19 January 1863: “I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”
Ordinary people, with nothing, on the right side of history. That is the thread.
None of what Manchester produced came from money or planning or institutional support. The Baby came from two men with radar expertise and a university basement. Ocean Software came from a clothing entrepreneur and a Quaker meeting house dungeon. Chuckie Egg came from a teenager with a ZX81 and a Saturday job fetching bacon butties. The Haçienda came from a band and a record label who thought Manchester needed somewhere to dance and decided to build it themselves.
The pattern is the same every time: someone arrives, or someone local gets bored, or someone just decides a thing needs to exist — and they make it, from nothing, without asking permission. That is not nostalgia. That is how it actually worked.
The question worth asking is whether it still can. Not because the talent has gone — it hasn’t, the University of Manchester produced the world’s purest silicon for quantum computing in 2024, and the game studios that remain produce work of genuine quality. The question is about what happens next. Because the pattern that follows the creation is also consistent: something swoops in. Like a seagull taking chips. The Haçienda — gone, luxury flats. Ocean Software — acquired by Infogrames. The graphene research, funded by £38 million of British taxpayer money — commercialised abroad. The council land in Ancoats, where the cotton workers once lived — sold to an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund on 999-year leases, no affordable housing, 4,000 children in temporary accommodation, a two-bedroom flat starting at £369,000. The game studios are down 78%. The museum that houses the Baby was nearly shut in 2013 as part of the austerity drive.
The ones that survived longest were the ones that stayed independent. Nigel Alderton made Chuckie Egg and it was his. The North West Computer Museum in Leigh runs on £7 entry fees and Patreon contributions and the donated time of people who care. They don’t have a sovereign wealth fund behind them. They don’t need one. They just need the building to stay open and the machines to keep working.
The question for 2026 isn’t whether the creative spirit exists here. It does. It always has. The question is whether the person who might be the next Nigel Alderton — teaching themselves to code, taking a Saturday job, making something from nothing — can afford to live here long enough to make it. Whether the next person arriving from somewhere else with something to build finds a city that makes room for them, or a city that’s already been sold.
Sell your soul and everything just becomes expensive wasteland. The tragedy is that the soul was built for free, by people with nothing, in a county the government forgot. And it was extraordinary.
Sources & Further Reading
Cotton Famine and Lincoln letter:
Lancashire Cotton Famine — Wikipedia
People’s World — Anti-Slavery Solidarity: Lincoln, Marx and British Workers
Lincoln’s letter to the Workingmen of Manchester, 19 January 1863, reproduced in full in the collected writings of Abraham Lincoln.
Friedrich Engels in Manchester:
Engels, F. (1845) The Condition of the Working Class in England. Written in Manchester 1844–45.
The Manchester Baby, Alan Turing and computing history:
Science and Industry Museum — The Baby and the Modern Computer
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine — Wikipedia
Alan Turing — Wikipedia
Science and Industry Museum — Alan Turing in Manchester
Chuckie Egg and Nigel Alderton:
The Guardian — The Making of Chuckie Egg (April 2026)
Bagshot Row — Chuckie Egg archive
Ocean Software:
Ocean Software — Wikipedia
Manchester game studio decline (78% between 2019–2026):
Mancunian Matters — Why Manchester is the Perfect Home for Gaming Companies (November 2025), citing UKie data.
TechRadar — The Manchester Game Dev Scene and the Northern Powerhouse That Never Was
Sheikh Mansour / New Islington land deal:
The Manchester Mill — The Contract That Gives Sheikh Mansour First Dibs on Manchester (2025)
The Guardian / The Land Is Ours — How Manchester Sold Itself to Abu Dhabi’s Elite, For a Song (Aditya Chakrabortty, July 2022), citing Sheffield University research.
Graphene commercialisation:
University of Manchester — Manchester Spin-Out Signs $1 Billion Deal with UAE’s Quazar Investment Company (April 2023)
University of Manchester — National Graphene Institute original funding announcement (2012)
Manchester quantum computing (world’s purest silicon, 2024):
University of Manchester — Faculty of Science and Engineering 2024 Highlights
North West Computer Museum:
nwcomputermuseum.org.uk
Science and Industry Museum closure threat (2013):
Parliamentary petition — Keep MOSI Open
Early Day Motion — Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry
Chuckie Egg (1983) will feature in our Looking Back series later this year. The Science and Industry Museum is on Liverpool Road, Manchester, and is free to visit — scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk.