Edsac Goes Live, At UK's National Museum of Computing

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 27, 2014 @06:15AM from the sometimes-things-get-lost-in-the-mail dept.

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Britain's National Museum of Computing has flipped the switch on the venerable Edsac computer. The arduous task of reconstructing the 1949 behemoth, fraught with little in terms of the original hardware or documentation, was brought to fruition on Wednesday. As project lead Andrew Herbert is quoted as saying, "We face the same challenges as those remarkable pioneers who succeeded in building a machine that transformed computing." A remarkably shaky video of the event, replete with excellent views of the floor at the videographer's feet, can be found here."

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These guys rule by hackertourist · 2014-11-27 07:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

The Colossus and Bombe replicas were amazing achievements, and they just keep going. Building complex machines with nothing but some photographs to go on.
Where's my 'we're not worthy' emoticon? _o_
Not working yet by Animats · 2014-11-27 07:12 · Score: 3, Informative

It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.
Re:512 bytes by _merlin · 2014-11-27 11:59 · Score: 2

It's 512 words, not bytes. Each word was over two bytes long. Memory was word-addressable.