Ferranti Pegasus

Pegasus was an early British vacuum-tube (valve) computer built by Ferranti Ltd that pioneered design features to improve usability for both engineers and programmers.

[4] Much of the development was the product of three men: W. S. (Bill) Elliott (hardware), Christopher Strachey (software) and Bernard Swann (marketing and customer support).

[9][10] In early 2014, the Science Museum decided to retire it permanently,[11] effectively ending the life of one of the world's oldest working computers.

In line with Strachey's second objective, it had a relatively generous instruction set for a computer of its time, but there was no explicit hardware provision for handling either characters or floating-point numbers.

[15] To what extent Strachey's third objective was reached, depends on how one views a price of £50,000 for Pegasus 1, which did not have magnetic tape drives, line printer or punched card input and output.

[17] In 1956 the first Pegasus was used to calculate the stresses and strains in the tail plane of the Saunders-Roe SR.53;[citation needed] the results were used to check the manufacturer's figures; the programmer was Anne Robson.

Because of the importance of a computer, it was housed in the drawing room, complete with an Adam's ceiling, of Ferranti's London office in Portland Place.

This was used, among other things, for a project to process the University's matriculation records[21] and by the British Market Research Bureau to analyze National Readership Survey data.