I recently rediscovered a few old PCs I had lying around in the loft. One was an Intel 486 desktop running Windows 3.11, another was a laptop that was even older (judging by the size of the beast). Curious to see what these old machines were like, I booted both up, or at least I tried to. Neither actually came back to life. The laptop didn’t show any signs of stirring at all, and the desktop machine wouldn’t get past what looked like a dead disk drive. I might have been unlucky with these particular machines, but reading about the recent reboot of the Harwell Dekatron, I couldn’t help but smile.
The Harkwell Dekatron was built in 1951 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, UK. Weighing 2.5 tonnes, this piece of history has been lovingly restored for the past few years, and amazingly is now back to its fully functional state - making it officially “the oldest working digital computer.” Makes my dead laptop look a bit pathetic doesn’t it? Have a look here for a few words from two of the original three developers who worked on the Harkwell, it really is a fascinating story.
This story got me thinking about the future, and what we might expect when booting up our current generation of devices in 25-50 years? As more and more computers move to solid state storage, the number of moving parts is decreasing. This means, under the right storage conditions, a much lower rate of mechanical failure… in theory, anyway. Can we expect our iPads and laptops to keep going way into the future? Quite possibly, yes. Will we all have moved onto Google Glasses and chips in our heads by then? That is probably a post for another day.