The oldest working digital computer in the world has been brought back to life at the U.K. National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) based at Bletchley Park. It has taken three years to restore after it had been lost for 15 years. The 2.5 tonne machine was built to help scientists at the U.K. Atomic Energy Ressearch Establishment at Harwell, according to the BBC.
The machine first ran in 1951 and was known as the Harwell Dekatron — so named for the valves it used as a memory store. Although slow — the machine took up to 10 seconds to multiply two numbers — it proved very reliable and often cranked up 80 hours of running time in a week.
When it became outmoded in 1957 it was given to Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College where it acquired its convoluted acronym “the WITCH” — Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell. In 1973 it was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in Birmingham which closed in 1997 when it was dismantled and put into storage.