Atlas (computer)
supercomputer of the 1960s
The Atlas was one of the world's first supercomputers, in use from 1962 (when it was claimed to be the most powerful computer in the world) to 1972. Atlas's capacity promoted the saying that when it went offline, half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. It is notable for being the first machine with virtual memory (at that time referred to as "one-level store") using paging techniques; this approach quickly spread, and is now ubiquitous.
Atlas was a second-generation computer, using discrete germanium transistors. Atlas was created in a joint development effort among the University of Manchester, Ferranti and Plessey. Two other Atlas machines were built: one for BP and the University of London, and one for the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton near Oxford.
A derivative system was built by Ferranti for the University of Cambridge. Called the Titan, or Atlas 2, it had a different memory organisation and ran a time-sharing operating system developed by Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. Two further Atlas 2s were delivered: one to the CAD Centre in Cambridge (later called CADCentre, then AVEVA), and the other to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), Aldermaston.
The University of Manchester's Atlas was decommissioned in 1971.
“Atlas (computer)” enters the record as supercomputer of the 1960s. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Atlas, computer and supercomputer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4816782. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1972 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Atlas (computer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.