[huntsman]

At one stage I suspected I was in charge of the oldest in use computer still running in the world.

In 2001, the Australian Navy still used the Mk152 computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_418 on the last remaining Charles F Adams class destroyer, HMAS BRISBANE.

It was a general purpose computer entirely constructed from individual transistors with magnetic core memory. We had two of these onboard and if both were down we couldn't fire the missile system. I had 3 sailors dedicates solely to keeping these ancient machines running.

We got to diagnose some pretty cool bugs, like what happens when the card corresponding the the lowest significant bit of the least use register has an intermittent fault due to a bad mechanical connection.

[nickpsecurity]

That's pretty neat. My favorite of the older ones was the NSA machine that used mercury for memory. Report said overflow errors were more serious than on most systsms. ;)

[contingencies]

In 2001 at RTA in Sydney they still had a PDP-11 they were proud of.