After World War II, Kilburn and Freddie Williams experimented with storing data with cathode ray tubes at Manchester University in England. They finally succeeded in June, 1948, creating the first stored-program computer.
Their machine was nicknamed The Baby, but it was anything but — it measured 7 by 16 feet. It solved its problem (factoring a number) in 52 minutes. In 1998, Kilburn marveled about how closely the feat was studied. “It is a wonderful thing that something we did 50 years ago is being remembered now in almost microscopic detail,” he said. “If I had known at the time it was going to be inspected so closely, I might not have done it.” Kilburn died January 17 in Manchester. He was 79.