The Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company Ltd was one of those typical British heavy industrial companies that diversified into all sorts of technologies. They built London Tube trains, Lancaster bombers during WW2, and also what is, to the best of my knowledge, the only commercial computer in the world built using point-contact transistors. This was not MV's first foray into numerical calculating machines, as they had built analogue computers previously. However, they took the bold step of commercialising the
Manchester transistor computer
, which is sometimes claimed to be the first such machine in the world.
This image from a Metropolitan Vickers advertising booklet shows a 'staticisers' circuit board from the machine, with a strong backlight so that both the components and the tracks are visible. The transistors can clearly be seen to be point-contact transistors of type TP1 or TP2, described on my
STC page.
This raises an interesting point because
Manchester University itself claims that MV changed the machine from point-contact to junction transistors to increase reliability. The shape of the transistors on the image is unambiguous: those are point-contact types. Therefore this MV booklet does not support the Manchester statement, unless it shows a prototype card that was later replaced by junction transistor circuits.
The complete contents of the MV booklet have been published on
another Web site.
I possess no parts of a Metrovick 950, but I would dearly love to see some because of my fascination with point-contact transistors.
The Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company Ltd was one of those typical British heavy industrial companies that diversified into all sorts of technologies. They built London Tube trains, Lancaster bombers during WW2, and also what is, to the best of my knowledge, the only commercial computer in the world built using point-contact transistors. This was not MV's first foray into numerical calculating machines, as they had built analogue computers previously. However, they took the bold step of commercialising the
Manchester transistor computer
, which is sometimes claimed to be the first such machine in the world.