3 Sep
2009
3 Sep
'09
3:37 p.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
The Harwell Dekatron Computer - aka. WITCH - has just arrived at TNMoC for
restoration. Once completed, it'll be (as far as we know) the oldest
functional, complete, stored-program electronic machine in the world (some
careful qualifying there, because of course it's one of a handful of
'pioneering' machines, all of which have their place in history).
Lots of links to news items on the machine at:
http://www.tnmoc.org/inthenews.aspx
Plans for the machine date from 1949, with it first running in 1951. Wikipedia
background info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WITCH_(computer)
This sounds interesting, but is there anything easily accessible that gives a
technical or architectural overview? Needless to say, the news releases don't.
So far, about all I get is it was largely relay-based, decimal, had a large
bank of dekatrons for register or RAM storage, was quite slow but quite
reliable (surprising for something with a bunch of dekatrons), and was sort-of
stored-program.
It sounds like one of those oddball-in-hindsight designs, so it could be
interesting to see how it all hung together.