How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap

Re:How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap... by joe_fishfish on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:12AM (#8657766)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

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Re:How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap... by tankenmate on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:24AM (#8657803)

An although it is only a replica the Colossus at Bletchley Park actually functions, unlike the ENIAC restoration.

Also of note is that by the end of the war the GC&CS had 10 working Colossi.

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Re:How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap... by rst on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:50AM (#8657902)

And the same museum at Bletchley Park (there are two) is building a functioning replica of the EDSAC, one of the first programmable, fully electronic computers:

http://www.tnmoc.org/special-projects/edsac

(Whether EDSAC was "the first" depends on how you define "computer", and what you think it means for a machine to be in operation, among other things, but it's one of several plausible claimants. The Z3, cited elsewhere here, was a programmable computer, but not fully electronic -- there was a lot of relay circuitry, which kept the clock rate down to about 10 Hz.)

From the title, I was honestly expecting the article to be about this project instead.

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