Baby for a project that he was working on at the National Physical Laboratory, where they had also been working on developing a computer. Tootill instructed Alan Turing on use of the Manchester Baby and debugged a program Turing had written to run on the Baby. In 1949, Tootill joined Ferranti where he developed the logic design of the first commercial computer (which was based on the Baby). He stayed at Ferranti only briefly and later the same year, he joined the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham as a Senior Lecturer on a considerably higher salary, lecturing and leading lab studies on digital computing. In 1956, Tootill joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough, researching issues for air traffic control systems. Here he wrote, with Stuart Hollingdale, "Electronic Computers", Penguin 1965, which ran through eight printings and was translated into Spanish and Japanese. Tootill was also a founding member of the British Computer Society in 1956. In 1963, Tootill joined the newly formed European Space Research Organisation (ESRO, now the European Space Agency). He set up and directed the Control Centre of ESRO, with its ground stations. In 1969, he was assigned to a bureaucratic post in London, which he did not enjoy. In 1973, he joined the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, where he developed communications standards for the European Informatics Network, an experimental computer network. Tootill retired in 1982, but remained active in computing. In 1997, drawing on his linguistics background (notably Latin, Greek, French and German), he designed a phonetic algorithm for encoding English names (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. A page from his June 1948 notebook details the code of the first ever software program, written by Tom Kilburn. Personal life As a boy, Tootill was interested in electronics, and built a radio set. He met Pamela Watson while in Malvern during World War II, where they were both members of the "Flying Rockets