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Dick Barnes, co-designer of oldest working computer, dies

One of the men who co-designed the world’s oldest working digital computer has died.  Richard ‘Dick’ Barnes helped to create the Harwell Dekatron which was used in 1951 in the nuclear research industry.  And in 2012, he helped to restart the 2.5-tonne computer.  He died on April 8^th at the age of 98, the National Museum of Computing have announced.

Dick and two colleagues Ted Cooke-Yarborough and Gurney Thomas started working on the computer in 1949.  At first, it was used in Oxfordshire at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment where it carried out jobs to support the first commercial nuclear reaction in Calder Hall.  In 1957, it moved to Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College where it was used to teach computing.

In 2012, the machine finished a three-year restoration project and was switched back on.  It worked as it always did – which was pretty slow.  It took 10 seconds to multiply two numbers!  But as Dick pointed out, the aim was to have a computer that ran all of the time and was reliable, not necessarily the quickest.  It was able to continuously for up to 80 hours when it was in frequent use.

Dick and his colleagues did their designing on paper without the tools we all think of as commonplace today and created something that there was very little previous experience to go on.  And the fact that the computer still does what it was designed to do today is a testament to their work.

Image from The National Museum of Computing