Why was the Manchester Baby important in the history of internally stored computer programs?

The Manchester Baby, constructed in 1948 at the University of Manchester, is historically significant as the first digital computer designed with internal programming capacity.12

While the concept of the stored-program computer was theoretically introduced by John von Neumann, the Baby served as the practical testbed for Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn to implement this architecture. Its primary importance lay in validating a new method of storing information on a cathode-ray tube, which allowed for direct access to stored data—a major advancement over the sequential access methods used in earlier systems.13

By enabling instructions to be stored in memory rather than determined by fixed machine wiring or punched tape, the Baby paved the way for more flexible and powerful computing. This innovation allowed computers to perform a variety of tasks in sequence, fundamentally shifting the role of hardware and setting the stage for the development of modern computer programming languages.321