STAFF at Harwell’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) have celebrated 50 years of supercomputing, since the Atlas 1 machine was first installed in 1964.

The device was so big – roughly the size of a large detached house – that RAL had to build the UK’s first purpose-built computer lab to house it.

Speaking at last Thursday’s anniversary, Dr Andrew Taylor, executive director of STFC National Laboratories said: “Since those early days, computing at RAL has gone from strength to strength, and the Atlas Centre is now home to Tier One – where data from the Large Hadron Collider [in Switzerland] is stored in the UK.

“Fifty years on, the technology is so far advanced that a mobile phone is more powerful and far cheaper than the Atlas computer.”

The Ferranti Atlas 1 computer was the largest of three world-beating computers built in the UK and cost £3m – about £80m today.

Its processor used more than 5,600 circuit boards, enough to cover a tennis court. Yet compared to the storage devices of today which can hold thousands of images, one of its discs could hold just two photographs.

The Atlas 1 itself closed on March 1973.

The console from the original Atlas computer is currently on display, along with other memorabilia, at RAL.

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