Stored-program computer in the context of Tom Kilburn

Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer (the first electromechanical being Konrad Zuse's Z3 completed in Berlin in 1941), although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers based on plans developed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.

The Olivetti Programma 101, also known as Perottina or P101, is one of the first "all in one" commercial desktop programmable calculators, although not the first.Produced by Italian manufacturer Olivetti, based in Ivrea, Piedmont, and invented by the Italian engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto, the P101 used many features of large computers of that period. It was launched at the 1964 New York World's Fair; volume production started in 1965. A futuristic design for its time, the Programma 101 was priced at $3,200(equivalent to $31,900 in 2024).About 44,000 units were sold, primarily in the US.

It is usually called a printing programmable calculator or desktop calculator because its arithmetic instructions correspond to calculator operations, while its instruction set (which allows for conditional jump) and structure qualifies it as a stored-program computer.

The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949.

The machine's successful operation was widely reported in the British press, which used the phrase "electronic brain" in describing it to their readers. That description provoked a reaction from the head of the University of Manchester's Department of Neurosurgery, the start of a long-running debate as to whether an electronic computer could ever be truly creative.

Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored-program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits. In 1967 he won the ACM Turing Award. At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge.