Another "oldest computer" story...

[Brent Hilpert]

Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
> The Harwell Dekatron Computer - aka. WITCH - has just arrived at TNMoC for
> restoration. Once completed, it'll be (as far as we know) the oldest
> functional, complete, stored-program electronic machine in the world (some
> careful qualifying there, because of course it's one of a handful of
> 'pioneering' machines, all of which have their place in history).
> 
> Lots of links to news items on the machine at:
> 
>    http://www.tnmoc.org/inthenews.aspx
> 
> Plans for the machine date from 1949, with it first running in 1951. Wikipedia
> background info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WITCH_(computer)

This sounds interesting, but is there anything easily accessible that gives a
technical or architectural overview? Needless to say, the news releases don't.
So far, about all I get is it was largely relay-based, decimal, had a large
bank of dekatrons for register or RAM storage, was quite slow but quite
reliable (surprising for something with a bunch of dekatrons), and was sort-of stored-program.

It sounds like one of those oddball-in-hindsight designs, so it could be
interesting to see how it all hung together.