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10 quirky photos of the computers that forever changed the face of tech by Sarah Jacobs on May 29, 2016, 9:06 AM  Photographer James Ball, also known as "Docubyte," always felt an affinity towards the world's earliest computers.
"I love looking at those old images online of vintage mainframe rooms and early huge computers," he told Business Insider. However, he had an urge to document these magnificent machines in a way that honored them better than the old black-and-white photos he was seeing. So Ball began to research, locating the computers that changed the course of technology, and found that most of them were sitting in museums. In his formal request to photograph them, Ball made it clear he would be photographing the machines in a way in which they'd never been seen. "I think [that] piqued [the museums'] interest and helped start a basis for the project," he said. Working with the production studio INK, Ball created 10 gorgeous photos and pulled historic information on each of the computers. His images and captions, below. SEE ALSO: We tried a startup that serves strangers a gourmet meal in random houses when the owners aren't home The Harwell Dekatron  The Harwell Dekatron, also known as the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH), is an early British relay-based computer created in the 1950s. Weighing in at more than 2.7 tons, it is now on display at the National Museum of Computing. The Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the world's oldest working digital computer for a second time in 2013.
The Pilot ACE  The Pilot ACE was one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom, at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the early 1950s. It was also one of the earliest stored program computers, joining other UK designs like the Manchester Mark 1 and EDSAC of the same era. The design is one of the earliest general computers designed by Alan Turing, although he left NPL before it was completed. The Pilot ACE consists of 800 vacuum tubes able to perform floating point arithmetic necessary for scientific calculations.
The IBM 1401  The IBM 1401 is a variable word length decimal computer first produced in 1959. The first member of the highly successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing tabulation machine equipment for processing data stored on punched cards. Over 12,000 units were produced, with some nations using them well into the 1980s.
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