Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/25/worlds_oldest_working_computer/
Brit 2.5-tonne nuke calculator is World's Oldest Working Computer
Elderly giant takes 10 seconds to divide a number
Posted in Vintage, 25th January 2013 15:02 GMT
Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
Britain's hefty Harwell Dekatron is back in the Guinness Book of World Records after being recognised - for the second time - as the world's oldest working digital computer.
The 2.5-tonne number-crunching goliath began life at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire, in 1951, and put reliability over processing speed.
The wall-sized calculator - also known as the WITCH computer - held the record for being the planet's oldest operative computer for several years before it was decommissioned in 1973. Last year's reboot brought the ancient ticker back to life [1] and allowed it to regain its title. It took three years of work by volunteers to restore the huge machine to its full working glory.
With 828 Dekatron tubes - used to build chains of counters and frequency dividers - and 480 relays and a user interface of 199 lamps, the whirring machine is a useful teaching tool, according to The National Museum of Computing where the beast nows lives and computes.
A video of the restoration process is on Youtube here:
Those specs in full:
- Power Consumption: 1.5kW
- Size: 2m high x 6m wide x 1m deep
- Weight: 2.5 tonnes
- Number of Dekatron counter tubes: 828
- Number of other valves: 131
- Number of relays: 480
- Number of contacts or relay switches: 7073
- Number of high speed relays: 26
- Number of lamps: 199
- Number of switches: 18
The WITCH is available to visit at The National Museum of Computing [2] in Bletchley Park. ®