After researching the first commercial transistor computer, the British Metrovick 950, Nina Kalinina wrote an emulator, simple assembler, and some additional “toys” (her word) so we can enjoy this machine today. First, what, exactly, is the Metrovick 950?
Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistor computer, is an early British computer, released in 1956. It is a direct descendant of the Manchester Baby (1948), the first electronic stored-program computer ever.
↫ Nina Kalinina
The Baby, formally known as Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was a foundation for the Manchester Mark I (1949). Mark I found commercial success as the Ferranti Mark I. A few years later, Manchester University built a variant of Mark I that used magnetic drum memory instead of Williams tubes and transistors instead of valves. This computer was called the Manchester Transistor Computer (1955). Engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers released a streamlined, somewhat simplified version of the Transistor Computer as Metrovick 950.
The emulator she developed is “only” compatible on a source code level, and emulates “the CPU, a teleprinter with a paper tape punch/reader, a magnetic tape storage device, and a plotter”, at 200-300 operations per second. It’s complete enough you can play Lunar Lander on it, because is a computer you can’t play games on really a computer?
Nina didn’t just create this emulator and its related components, but also wrote a ton of documentation to help you understand the machine and to get started. There’s an introduction to programming and using the Metrovick 950 emulator, additional notes on programming the emulator, and much more. She also posted a long thread on Fedi with a ton more details and background information, which is a great read, as well.
This is amazing work, and interesting not just to programmers interested in ancient computers, but also to historians and people who really put the retro in retrocomputing.
