"The world's oldest original working digital computer is going on display at The National Museum of Computing in Buckinghamshire."
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20395212
"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."
:o
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I'd have said the worlds first working computer that today's computers follow the design of (von Neumann architecture) is the Manchester Mark 1.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1
It was also referred to as the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine. It first ran in April 1949. So someone should tell the BBC and the National Museum about it :-)
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There is ALWAYS a dispute over the first computer, and trying to categorise what makes a computer is always the argument employed.
The only answer is that it was here, or the states, and some time between 1943 and 1949
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I'm absolutely not an expert in this field, but when I visited Bletchley Park last autumn they were claiming that the Colossus was the world's first electronic, digital, programmable computer, designed by one Tommy Flowers. Apparently the prototype, the Mark 1, was operational in December 1943.
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I think the point about this machine is that it is still working.
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>> I'm absolutely not an expert in this field, but when I visited Bletchley Park last
>> autumn they were claiming that the Colossus was the world's first electronic, digital, programmable computer,
>> designed by one Tommy Flowers. Apparently the prototype, the Mark 1, was operational in December
>> 1943.
It was built by Tommy Flowers, using experimental PO exchange equipment. I was lucky enough to speak to one of the co-builders at Bletchley when they were doing the first test runs of the rebuilt machine - Guy called Tony Sale, died last year, (they offered me a volunteer job cataloging and researching whole shed loads of old computer stuff they have - as yet untouched).
Colusus was the first all electronic digital computer, but it had no stored memory. This is one of the argument clauses I referred to.
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>> Colusus was the first all electronic digital computer, but it had no stored memory. This
>> is one of the argument clauses I referred to.
And the other reason people use against it was that it was in no way general purpose, it was built for one specific function.
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>>they offered me a volunteer job
I exclaimed too loudly 'mugsies, I'd forgotten about mugsies'. Quick as a flash they interrogated me about my expertise as they wanted someone with maintenance experience.
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The rack on the left-hand side of the picture looks as though it is full of valves, but I think they are all Dekatron tubes, which are cold-cathode tubes that divide by 10. If you are working to a base of 10, much simpler than flip-flops that required two valves to just divide by two, with four pairs plus feedback to get them to count in 10s.
Dekatrons were also used as the output for scintillation counters in the early days of the nuclear industry. I spent some time servicing them, and once they were operational they were checked by getting them to count the mains frequency overnight. You would set up a batch of them and on arriving in the morning switch off the mains signal. If they all read the same, plus or minus one digit, they were okay.
I can’t remember the precise application, but in the early days of ITV they used a device with Dekatron tubes for timing advert insertions.
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Aretas, if you read the article it confirms they are Dekatron tubes, and the computer was originally used in the nuclear industry at Harwell.
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Correct. The Colossus is the world's first programmable, electronic computer. However, that is a replica and the Dekatron is an original.
The reason the Colossus was only recognised as the first recently is that it was classified and all evidence that the things ever existed, outside of the secret squirrels' archives, was destroyed.
The ENIAC retains the crown as the first general purpose computer. The Colossus was not Turing-complete (irony alert!) and could only perform the type of cryptographic problems it was built to handle.
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You think an Intel Atom is slow... - rtj70
