The Strange Beauty of Historic Computers Brought Back From the Dead

When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren’t cars you smell. Those are computers. 

This is the “1401 Room” on the first floor of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — the room where Robert Garner and his motley crew of amateur technicians have spent the last decade reviving two of the massive IBM 1401 mainframe computers that littered the business world throughout the ’60s and on into ’70s.

 

As the door opens, you can see not only the 1401s themselves, but the mechanical punch-card machine where they take instructions from the outside world, the towering drives where they store data on spinning spools of tape, and even the desk-sized printer where they funnel information onto good old-fashioned paper. There’s a gentle hum in the room. You can feel the heat coming off the machines. And, yes, you can smell them too. Garner says it’s the odor of the oils used in some of the mechanical equipment, including the printer and the punch-card reader.

 

This assault on your senses is one of the chief reasons Garner and his cohorts have spent all these years restoring the two IBMs. They want to show a new generation what these machines were like — and they want to show it as completely as possible. “This is the creation of a time machine,” Garner says. “When people are here, experiencing this, it sparks their imagination. It transfers them back in time, but it also takes them forward in time. It makes them feel like they too can build new things.”

 

Garner and his team also work on the IBMs because it’s fun. “Though you might say that people who do this kind of thing are crazy — and you’d wouldn’t be wrong — we enjoy doing it together,” says Stan Paddock, another member of the group. But Garner is right: there’s a larger payoff. And you feel it as soon as you step into the room.

 

In short, Garner and his team are historians — in the purest sense of the word. And thankfully, they’re not alone.

 

At the Computer History Museum, volunteers have toiled to revive a wide range of artifacts from an earlier age of American computing, including the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-1. Across the Atlantic, in Great Britain, theComputer Conservation Society has sponsored an even longer list of restoration projects, overseeing the revival of such seminal machines as the WITCH (the world’s oldest digital computer) and the Colossus (used to crack German codes during the Second World War). And then there are hobbyists like Bill Degnan, people across the globe who spend their free time rebuilding whatever old machines they can get their hands on — and occasionally flaunting their work at events like the Vintage Computer Festival.

 

Sadly, we can’t show you what these machines smell like. Or what they sound like. Or what they feel like. But we can show you what they look like — or at least try. With the gallery of images above, we give you a few of our favorites.

 

Above

 

Behold, the 1401 Room. You can see the punch-card machine on the right, the tape drives against the wall at the back, the printer in the middle of the frame, and the 1401 itself on the left, with the blue stripe running across its top edge. This massive collection of machinery was the most popular business computer of the 1960s.

 

Robert Garner — a modern-day IBM researcher who has also worked for such tech giants as Xerox and Sun Microsystems — bootstrapped the restoration project in 2008 when the Computer Museum History acquired the remnants of a 1401 from an outfit in Germany. He sliped an ad into a Silicon Valley newsletter for IBM retirees, and soon, he had a team of technicians with the know-how to rebuild the thing.

 

A few years later, Garner was contacted by a man who who had a 1401 in his Connecticut home. This machine was built in 1961, but the man’s family had used it to track expenses for the local country club through the mid-’90s. It was in slightly better shape than Garner’s german 1401, so the museum bought it too.

 

If you’re a Stanley Kubrick fan, the printer may look familiar. It’s an IBM 1403, which makes a cameo in Kubrick’s Cold War black comedy, Dr. Strangelove. There’s a 1403 at the Air Force Base where Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper unilaterally launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his second in command, played by Peter Sellers, doesn’t realize what has happened until he finds a transistor radio tucked inside the lip of the printer.

 

If you visit the 1401 Room at Computer History Museum, you too will find a transistor radio — right where Sellers did.

 

 

Images: Computer History Museum

This is what you find when you open up the 1401 — and it may help you understand why Robert Garner and his team have spent so many years repairing the thing. It’s not the simplest of machines. And the team only meets on Wednesdays. 

Image: Computer History Museum

Big computer restorations are far more prevalent in the U.K. — as you might expect. “We have a history of history,” says Google researcher John Wilkes, who grew up in Britain. 

According to Kevin Murrell, the secretary of the UK’s Computer Conservation Society, the British have always had a certain affection for restoring old machinery — from cars to trains — and it only stands to reason that they would tackle computers too. Murrell helped found the CCS in the late 80s, and he was part of the team that restored the WITCH, a digital computer originally built in 1951 as a number-cruncher for the U.K.’s atomic research facility at Harwell.

 

After six years at Harwell, it started a new life as a teaching tool at the nearby Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College, and that’s where it got the name. WITCH is short for Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell.

 

In the photo above, project leader Tony Fraser fine-tunes the WITCH inside Britain’s National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. This past year, Fraser, Murrell, and the rest of the team actually rebooted the thing (see video below).

 

Photo: John Robertson, for The National Museum of Computing.

 

The WITCH — aka the Harwell Dekatron — as it appeared around 1963. It was built with gas-filled tubes and mechanical relays, and it weighed 2.5 metric tons. 

Photo: The National Museum of Computing.

Charles Babbage is known as “the father of the computer.” Between 1847 and 1849, he designed a seminal calculating machine he called the Difference Engine Number 2. He never actually built the thing, but about 150 years later, Allan Bromley, Doron Swade, and others brought the machine to life at the London Science Museum. 

Photo: London Science Museum

In the mid-1930s, Douglas Hartree of Manchester University built an early analogue computer known as the Differential Analyser. Eighty years on, Charles Lindsay — a noted computer scientist and programmer — helped restore the machine at the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology. 

Photo: Charles Lindsey, Manchester Museum of Science and Technology

Lindsey’s Differential Analyser, as seen from above. 

Photo: Charles Lindsey, Manchester Museum of Science and Technology

During World War II, the Colossus helped crack the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park, and Bletchley — reborn as Britain’s National Museum of Computing — is now home to a rebuilt Colossus, completed in 2007. This is the rear of the machine. 

Photo: John Robertson, for The National Museum of Computing.

And this is the Colossus from the front. The machine’s original blueprints and hardware were destroyed after the war, but Tony Sale and his team were able to restore the machine using other materials, including notebooks kept by Bletchley engineers. 

Photo: John Robertson, for The National Museum of Computing.

A look at some of the over 2,500 thermionic valves, or vacuum tubes, used in the restored Colossus. 

Photo: John Robertson, for The National Museum of Computing.

But not all restorations find a home in a museum of computer history. This photo was taken inside the Delaware workshop of Bill Degnan, who belongs to a vintage computing restoration club known the Mid Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, or MARCH. Degnan has restored more machines than we could possibly list, and this is one of them: a Vector Graphics MZ, originally built around 1980. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

Bill Degnan’s IMSAI, a machine that made its debut in the mid-1970s. Here, he’s talking to the machine using a Digital Decwriter II printer. A glass display would be too easy. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

The 1972 DEC PDP 11/05 that Degnan restored from old parts. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

Degnan is also involved with the Vintage Computer Festival, where hobbyists from around the globe show off their old-school machines. This is an ASR 33 Teletype that Degnan restored and displayed at the seventh Vintage Computing Festival in 2011, at the Infoage Science Center in Wall, New Jersey. In the late ’70s, a teletype was the standards means of trading information with the beefy computers of the day. It served as both keyboard and printer. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

A “before shot” of a Friden Flexowriter, a teletype-like device that dates back to late 1950s and early 1960s. At the time, it was a radical departure — from punch cards. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

An IBM Mainframe card reader on display at Vintage Computer Festival 7. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

A paper-tape reader used to read program data into a Burroughs minicomputer. 

Photo: Bill Degnan

The control console on the Ferranti Pegasus, believed to be the oldest working digital computer in the world. It wasn’t restored to working condition. It was always in working condition, says Leonard Hewitt, who oversees the Pegasus at the London Science Museum. The system ran its first program in 1959 and Hewitt says it still runs on command. 

Photo: London Science Museum

A replica of the Manchester Mark 1 “Baby,” on display at the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester, England. The Baby made its debut in 1948 at the University of Manchester, the first computer to operate off a stored program. 

Image: Museum of Science & Industry.

The Baby as it looked all those years ago.