The Ferranti Mark 1 was the world’s first general-purpose digital computer commercially accessible. It was “a more polished and commercialized version of the Manchester Mark I.”
– Mark 1 displayed a 20-bit word as a single line of dots of electric charges on the surface of a Williams tube display, with each cathode tube storing 64 lines of dots.– The Ferranti Mark 1 specification resembled the final Manchester Mark 1 standard exceptionally closely.
The machine was invented by Ferranti of the United Kingdom and is based on the Manchester Mark 1, designed by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester.
The Ferranti Mark 1 was the first general-purpose computer to be commercially available. The Ferranti Mark 1 model was used to predict election results, compute pay, and create actuarial tables, among other things.