Like a lot of early machines, ICCE was made in part from ex-GPO relays. (ie, it was electromechanical.) Valves were more expensive and relays were flooding the market post-war.
Guess which WW2 activity used a very large number of relays, and was made by the GPO (who used relays heavily in telephony), and was subsequently discontinued by the GPO at wars end as things to do with encoding and decoding scaled back thus flooding the electronics market in the UK with relays...
Tommy Thomas (head of the ERCC in edinburgh where my dad wound up and I therefore lived) worked at Manchester on the Mark 1. He never talked about it and I never asked, subsequently. We both wound up in Australia at the CSIRO, where Radiophysics had been started by people in the radar space, and that bled into their interest in Computing. it's a small world. He was the head of the IT division and I was a lowly researcher, our paths didn't cross much. I wish I'd talked to him more, about this stuff and computer history.
Seems like a click baiting kind of question that I'd surely Bombe.
I ended up mainly doing geophysical field work with a lot of aquisition, processing, and interpretation coding work .. but I dabbled in symbolic computer algebra systems (in Australia) for a while and loitered a little in technical history of the borderline classified - I interviewed "for the record" Leonard Beadell, Jack Wong Sue, Mark Oliphant, people associated with the Mungalalu Truscott Airbase, etc.
I seem to recall a fair bit was done here with early over the horizon radar work but I didn't go far in that direction ending up more in radiometrics and resource | energy tracking.
In the pop-sci space, Robert Buderi's book on radar is really about a lot more than Radar, and covers off on the field really well including Taffy Bowen's work in Australia and the contribution to radioastronomy. (you probably know it)
Guess which WW2 activity used a very large number of relays, and was made by the GPO (who used relays heavily in telephony), and was subsequently discontinued by the GPO at wars end as things to do with encoding and decoding scaled back thus flooding the electronics market in the UK with relays...
Tommy Thomas (head of the ERCC in edinburgh where my dad wound up and I therefore lived) worked at Manchester on the Mark 1. He never talked about it and I never asked, subsequently. We both wound up in Australia at the CSIRO, where Radiophysics had been started by people in the radar space, and that bled into their interest in Computing. it's a small world. He was the head of the IT division and I was a lowly researcher, our paths didn't cross much. I wish I'd talked to him more, about this stuff and computer history.