It’s World Digital Preservation Day! To celebrate this year we would like to share the beginnings of Manchester City Council’s digital journey and how we are now preserving digital records to ensure they can be accessed in years to come.
This seems fitting as it can be argued that Manchester is the birthplace of modern computing. The Manchester Baby developed by Sir Freddie Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill at the University of Manchester was the first computer with memory meaning that it could store programs to run again and again. A vital first step to developing the computers we have today. In 1948 Baby ran its first program to calculate the highest factor of a number.
The Manchester Baby was quickly followed by the Manchester Mark 1 introduced in 1949 and pictured below from our local image collection:
1945-1964 Hollerith
Manchester City Council’s move towards the digital age started in 1945 when the City first purchased the Hollerith accounting system, an entirely mechanical machine that used punch cards to move tumblers and display totals. It was developed and first patented during the 1880s in America by Herman Hollerith originally to manage the data collected for the 1890 US census.
The first electronic machine purchased was the Hollerith Type 550 Electronic Calculator installed in 1957, not only did this help significantly with internal accounting processes such as payroll but it also changed the way in which information relating to general rates and water rates were recorded using punch cards.
It was clear that more work could benefit from the use of a computer and so in 1962 a Feasibility Team was set up to investigate other available machines. By 1964 the first mainframe computer LEO III had been approved and purchased by Manchester Corporation, the second machine purchased in the country to be used in Local Government.
Lyons Electronic Office (LEO III)
The Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) was the world’s first business computer developed by the teashop J. Lyons & Company Ltd in 1951 who sought a way to efficiently manage orders between their shops and saw the opportunities a computer could bring to the running of their business. Their success in developing such a computer led to the establishment of Leo Computers Ltd.
LEO III was a computer developed for commercial work, it could run several programs at the same time and used magnetic tape as well as punch cards and paper tape equipment. The programming language was CLEO which stands for Clear Language for Expressing Orders allowing instructions to be specified in words rather than code.
When it was installed in 1964 it was the most advanced machine available for commercial data processing
– City Treasurers Report to the Finance and Establishment Committees, 1967
The new machines were to be used from 8.15am until 11pm, 5 days per week. In addition to the council’s work, after 5pm it was agreed for the first 3 years that Leo Computers Limited would be able to use the machines to provide support in the North West. Time could then be loaned out to other companies wanting to use this computer, the aim was for it to eventually be used 24 hours a day.
Due to the large size of the machines as well as the input and output devices required it was necessary to create a computer centre within Manchester Town Hall to house them. An area was renovated, with air conditioning installed to keep the heat at bay.
Much of the work that was completed using this new computer would have been accountancy work, however a newspaper article in the Manchester Guardian published in 1964 described some of the other tasks it could do:
- Calculating and printing 12,000 weekly wages in 5 hours;
- Store vast amounts of information e.g. the rating records of 200 000 city properties – contained on three reels of magnetic tape.
- Processing 450,000 invoices a year, 200,000 cheques annually and 115,000 costing records a month.
And some of the work it hoped to complete in the near future:
- Deliveries of school meals;
- Sewage network calculations;
- School timetables;
- The phasing of traffic signals.
The second chapter in the story of computers in the Manchester Corporation opens with the choice of a LEO III; the indications are that the remaining pages, when they are written, will tell a story of changes and developments of more fundamental significance to the work of the Corporation than could be imagined in 1955
– City of Manchester. Computers for Manchester Corporation in the City Treasurer’s Department using a LEO III (M770/Box 17)
What Next?
There’s not a lot of information in our collections about the next digital move however, there are some photographs of the installation of a Honeywell OPS 90.
These machines were so large and heavy that they required the hire of a crane to lift the machines up to the window of the Town Hall to be delivered, as can be seen from the photograph below:
As technology developed these machines were replaced by more recognisable computers.
Digital Records Today
Most records we’re creating today are digital and at Manchester Archives we want to continue recording our city’s story. However, digital records are fragile, we can’t simply leave these on one type of storage media in a box and confidently know that these will still be accessible in 5, 10, 20 years. The technology we use updates quickly to ensure that we’re working with the most efficient and secure devices and applications which means the lifespan of this machinery and software can be quite short – making digital preservation an everchanging challenge.
It is essential that we continue to build our digital preservation programme. Finding the best way for us to collect, preserve, store and make digital archives accessible.
One way that we have recently built on our digital preservation offer is thanks to The National Archives Resilience Fund which has allowed Greater Manchester Local Authority Archives and Local Studies to purchase and share the equipment required to access different types of storage media such as floppy disks, CDs and internal hard drives. We can also access the software needed to collect information to preserve these digital files such as file formats needed to be consistently monitored so that they are in the most relevant format for our visitors to access.
As part of this project the equipment has been travelling between the different Greater Manchester authorities and has so far been of great use to Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Manchester. The remaining 6 authorities are set to use the equipment before the end of March 2025.