TNMoC
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2013–2018
0:50 · 1.1M views · Nov 21, 2012
A short clip of the Harwell Dekatron/WITCH, the world's oldest original working digital computer from 1951, being restarted at The National Museum of Computing in 2012.
Shared as a quick look at a vintage relay and dekatron computer running, along with praise for the museum.
3 comments from Hacker News
TNMOC is awesome. Every geek in the UK should go. You can gift them old computing books for their growing library. Colossus is cool but seeing stuff I never knew about was more exciting e.g. The Dekatron with its decimal memory you can visually see the values, the awesome radar screens with trakker balls from the 40's or 50's, the cabinets full of early calculators (some are white spitting images of iDevices) or the early CAD system with a graphics card in a larger cabinet than the workstation. Early mainframes and minicomputers are just beautifully styled. 1 min video of the Dekatron running this video More info and 20 min video [LINK]
Last month I had the pleasure I of seeing a Dekatron[1] in action (for those that don't know, a dekatron is a decimal based computer, rather than binary). The machine in question is the oldest working computer in the world (older machines like the Colossus are actually reconstructions) and uses relays rather than valves. It was a true sight to see in action as the relays spin round with a hypnotic orange glow[2] [1] [LINK] [2] this video (the video doesn't really do it justice)
The Harwell WITCH used Dekatrons, which is a device that has 10 states and can therefore store one decimal digit each. this video