Nimrod © 1951 Ferranti, Ltd.
The Nimrod, built in the United Kingdom by Ferranti for the 1951 Festival of Britain, was an early computer custom-built to play Nim, inspired by the earlier Nimatron.
The game of Nim running on the Nimrod is a candidate for one of the first video games, as it was one of the first computer games to have any sort of visual display of the game. It appeared only four years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game to use an electronic display, and one year after Bertie the Brain, a computer similar to the Nimrod which played tic-tac-toe at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The Nimrod's use of light bulbs rather than a screen with real-time visual graphics, however, much less moving graphics, does not meet some definitions of a video game.
Designed by: John Makepeace Bennett, Raymond Stuart-Williams