Harwell Dekatron / WITCH Reboot tnmoc.org

A glimpse of the Harwell Dekatron / WITCH bursting back into life at The National Museum of Computing on 20 November 2012. (Full version now at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYpPPI... ) The machine - the world's oldest original working digital computer dating from 1951 - can be seen at TNMOC, located on Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, UK. Opening times: http://www.tnmoc.org/visit
In front of the machine are seated two of the the designers and two early users.
School groups and the public come to TNMOC to learn about computer heritage and it is hoped that students will be inspired to become the next generation of computer scientists and engineers.
Lots more videos of the event to come, so do subscribe to the TNMOC channel.
More information on the computer at www.tnmoc.org
Video by TVUK for TNMOC and kindly sponsored by Google UK.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Atsidi Smith]

honestly when I clicked on this video I had no idea what it was, I thought those were coke bottles in the default picture

[Alex Holtman]

can it play battlefield 3 on ultra settings

[Steve Netting]

Fantastic video - shame about the comments. Don't you guys realise this works on the same fundamental principles as your iPads - only this is so much cooler as you can actually *see* the process working?

[Pyr01]

slap a Apple logo charge $2000 watch hipsters and tools line up

[cenzo188]

I love those noises.

[MrSJayG6]

But can it run Crysis?

[BvousBrainSystems]

Now there are so many fucking zeros I might well be mistaken, but according to my math, my modern AMD gaming CPU has 4 billions of those in it. And some millions, but millions don't even matter anymore at that scale.

[tereraiyaniso]

Ah so thats what powers Internet Explorer...

[tereraiyaniso]

Man we have come a long way

[mofoq]

that "da da da da" reminds me of when my hard drive died

[rdewes]

it runs Tibia at least

[David Guerra]

I remember how these machines were portrayed on Disney cartoons. One would ask anything to the computer, it would make a few or a bunch of "thinking" noises and then print out or say the answer. If the question was too hard pieces would start falling off of it or smoke coming out.