Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Floydoid]

Britain's oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order.

The computer, which was designed in 1949, first ran in 1951 and was designed to perform mathematical calculations; it lasted until 1973.

When first built the 2.4m x 5m computer was state-of-the-art, although it was superseded by transistor-based systems.

The restoration project is expected to take a year.

The system was built and used by staff at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire....

The machine was a relay-based computer using 900 Dekatron gas-filled tubes that could each hold a single digit in memory - similar to RAM in a modern computer - and paper tape for both input and program storage...
 

Full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8234428.stm

[roseway]

Great stuff!

Would it run Vista, do you think?

[Floydoid]

I doubt it Eric.

[kitz]

Great stuff!

Would it run Vista, do you think?

 

Funny enough I was looking at the specs the other night of one of the earliest TCs that we used to have in most of the smaller branches at work which only had 1K (80 bit) of disk memory. 

[broadstairs]

I doubt it would run Linux either 

Reminds me of a IBM 604 which I worked on briefly in 1966 which contained about 1000 (I think) valves, gave me the willy's when I had to supervise a move from one part of a factory to another and get it working again! As luck would have it nothing went wrong and it worked fine when powered up again, boy was I relieved.