[4][1][5][6][2][7][8] Tootill attended King Edward's School, Birmingham on a Classics scholarship and in 1940 gained an entrance exhibition to study Mathematics at Christ's College, Cambridge.
In 1947, he was recruited by Frederic Calland Williams to join another ex-TRE colleague, Tom Kilburn, at Manchester University developing the world's first wholly electronic stored-program computer.
In the UK, three projects were then underway to develop a stored program computer (in Cambridge, the NPL and Manchester) and the main technical hurdle was the memory technology.
In 1956, Tootill joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough, researching issues for air traffic control systems.
[14] In 1997, drawing on his linguistics background (notably Latin, Greek, French and German), he designed a phonetic algorithm for encoding English names[15] (to recognise that e.g. Deighton and Dayton, Shore and Shaw sound the same) which garnered over 2,000 corporate users as part of a data matching package developed by his son Steve.
In 1998, the Computer Conservation Society (in a project led by Christopher P Burton) unveiled a replica of the Baby (which is now in the Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester)) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the running of the first electronically stored program, based in large part on Tootill's notes and recollections.