Oldest computer

The first fully automated, software-driven computer was designed and run by Tom Kilburn (UK) and Freddie Williams (UK) on the 21 of June, 1948. They used a 17-instruction program on a machine called 'Baby', which calculated the highest factor of 2 to the power of 18. 'Baby' is 16 ft. long, 7 ft. high and 2 ft. deep. It originally contained 1 ton of wires and vacuum tubes occupying an entire room. Still, it had 1,024 bit of memory and could work out seven instruction types. By June 1998, British company ICL had reconstructed the computer and donated it to the Museum of Science and Industry, in Manchester. Baby was originally dismantled after Williams started to work on its successor, the Ferranti Mark 1, the commercial machine from which ICL's computers descended. In 1997, the British Computer Conservation Society posted a simulator on the Internet so users could try their hand at programming 'Baby'. Since she was built before programming languages were invented, participants didn't need to be professional programmers.