Lords of legacy

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Loz Pycock

Eighty years ago, the first general-purpose digital computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), debuted to the public. It's part of a remarkable lineage of computers that shaped the digital era. Some of them are still running and, no, not those machines still using Windows XP. These systems go back even further, but they can still boot up and process some bits today.

Designed in the late 1940s and becoming operational in 1951, the Harwell Dekatron automated calculations previously churned by human operators, who were also called "computors". By 1957, it had become obsolete and graduated as an education tool at the Wolverhampton and Staffordshire College of Technology, earning it the moniker WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell). In 2012, volunteers at The National Museum of Computing restored one, earning Guinness World Records recognition as the oldest original working digital computer (adding to a 1973 Guinness record as the world's most durable computer).