After developing the Colossus computer for code breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II, Max Newman was committed to the development of a computer incorporating both Alan Turing's mathematical concepts and the stored-program concept that had been described by John von Neumann.
In 1945, he was appointed to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at Manchester University; he took his Colossus-project colleagues Jack Good and David Rees to Manchester with him, and there they recruited F. C. Williams to be the "circuit man" for a new computer project for which he had secured funding from the Royal Society.

"Having secured the support of the university, obtained funding from the Royal Society, and assembled a first-rate team of mathematicians and engineers, Newman now had all elements of his computer-building plan in place.
Adopting the approach he had used so effectively at Bletchley Park, Newman set his people loose on the detailed work while he concentrated on orchestrating the endeavor."

— David Anderson, historian
Following his appointment to the Chair of Electrical Engineering at Manchester University, Williams recruited his TRE colleague Tom Kilburn on secondment.
By the autumn of 1947 the pair had increased the storage capacity of the Williams tube from one bit to 2,048, arranged in a 64 by 32-bit array, and demonstrated that it was able to store those bits for four hours.
Engineer Geoff Tootill joined the team on loan from TRE in September 1947, and remained on secondment until April 1949.

"Now let's be clear before we go any further that neither Tom Kilburn nor I knew the first thing about computers when we arrived at Manchester University ... Newman explained the whole business of how a computer works to us."

— Frederic Calland Williams
Kilburn had a hard time recalling the influences on his machine design:
"[I]n that period, somehow or other I knew what a digital computer was . . .
Where I got this knowledge from I’ve no idea."

— Tom Kilburn
Jack Copeland explains that Kilburn's first (pre-Baby) accumulator-free (decentralized, in Jack Good's nomenclature) design was based on inputs from Turing, but that he later switched to an accumulator-based (centralized) machine of the sort advocated by von Neumann, as written up and taught to him by Jack Good and Max Newman.

The Baby's 7-op instruction set was approximately a subset of the 12-op instruction set proposed in 1947 by Jack Good, in the first known document to use the term "Baby" for this machine.
Good did not include a "halt" instruction, and his proposed conditional jump instruction was more complicated than what the Baby implemented.
After developing the Colossus computer for code breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II, Max Newman was committed to the development of a computer incorporating both Alan Turing's mathematical concepts and the stored-program concept that had been described by John von Neumann. In 1945, he was appointed to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at Manchester University; he took his Colossus-project colleagues Jack Good and David Rees to Manchester with him, and there they recruited F. C. Williams to be the "circuit man" for a new computer project for which he had secured funding from the Royal Society.
"Having secured the support of the university, obtained funding from the Royal Society, and assembled a first-rate team of mathematicians and engineers, Newman now had all elements of his computer-building plan in place. Adopting the approach he had used so effectively at Bletchley Park, Newman set his people loose on the detailed work while he concentrated on orchestrating the endeavor."
— David Anderson, historian
Following his appointment to the Chair of Electrical Engineering at Manchester University, Williams recruited his TRE colleague Tom Kilburn on secondment. By the autumn of 1947 the pair had increased the storage capacity of the Williams tube from one bit to 2,048, arranged in a 64 by 32-bit array, and demonstrated that it was able to store those bits for four hours. Engineer Geoff Tootill joined the team on loan from TRE in September 1947, and remained on secondment until April 1949.
"Now let's be clear before we go any further that neither Tom Kilburn nor I knew the first thing about computers when we arrived at Manchester University ... Newman explained the whole business of how a computer works to us."
— Frederic Calland Williams
Kilburn had a hard time recalling the influences on his machine design:
"[I]n that period, somehow or other I knew what a digital computer was . . . Where I got this knowledge from I’ve no idea."
— Tom Kilburn
Jack Copeland explains that Kilburn's first (pre-Baby) accumulator-free (decentralized, in Jack Good's nomenclature) design was based on inputs from Turing, but that he later switched to an accumulator-based (centralized) machine of the sort advocated by von Neumann, as written up and taught to him by Jack Good and Max Newman.
The Baby's 7-op instruction set was approximately a subset of the 12-op instruction set proposed in 1947 by Jack Good, in the first known document to use the term "Baby" for this machine. Good did not include a "halt" instruction, and his proposed conditional jump instruction was more complicated than what the Baby implemented.
Manchester Baby