He refurbished the world's oldest computer
2018-09-20
A computer from Britain's atomic energy research programme in the 1950's has been restored and is now the oldest running computer in the world.
Refurbishing computers and giving them a second life is always a blessed task. Noone has done it better than Kevin Murrell.
The Harwell Dekatron machine is the oldest working computer in the world, but it is still in daily use as part of an education programme at The National Museum of Computing, some 80 kilometres north of London. Being slightly bigger than today's computers (weighing in at two tonnes), it is a visually impressive piece of equipment. And, of course, it has an entry in the Guinness book of records.
The founder of the museum, Kevin Murrell, found parts of the Harwell Dekatron in Birmingham in 2007. After some detective work he identified the rest of the machine and the museum started piecing the various components together. By 2012, the machine was fully functional again, and is now a centrepiece of the museum.