A question for you. What weighs five tons and lives in a shed? Got the answer? Oh, you may be wondering a lot of things :D :) let me get it straight. Flossie is the answer. More accurately, a 6m by 7m (20ft by 23 ft) ICT 1301 mainframe computer which dates almost from 1960s. You may be wondering why I am speaking about an old piece. Its because the latest news says, its on the way of resurrection. The National Museum of Computing has taken delivery of what it believes is the last ICT 1301 computer.The museum hopes to put it on display by 2016. This computer was originally used to produce exam results for students at University of London. The museum hopes to put it on display by 2016.
There was a time when computers were so huge with valves and thousands of vaccum tubes, and believe me the heat that they generate was incredible making it difficult for normal business. So what makes Flossie special? This machine used transistors, which used to little power. It means we don't need any sort of complex equipments for cooling and wouldn't require high power that earlier computers needed.
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