However even its most fervent fan could never have guessed that all these years later the historic computer, which is around eight foot high, 16 feet long and a foot wide, would still be making the headlines.

Yesterday it became the world’s oldest original digital working computer when it was re-booted following a three-year repair project at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes.

And although the 2.5-ton computer first started life back in 1951 in Harwell, Oxfordshire, the team that has put it back together credits its time in Wolverhampton and the studious notes and photographs taken about it between 1957 and 1973 as being instrumental in getting it back up and running again.