COMPUTER SCIENCE

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I didn’t think I be back on this topic so soon. But following my last post both Bob Johns (@whilom_music on Instagram) and Zoe’s Feather Boa (@zoesfeatherboa.bsky.social) reached out with more information on those grey computer panels I have been looking at. It turns out that what I thought was just a prop, a bit of wood with few lights and switches, is actually a real computer!


Created in 1962, the ICT1301 was a British made business computer from International Computers and Tabulators. As you can see from the image above, the grey panels from Doctor Who were just a small part of a very large machine. Very few of these computers still exist. The most famous example can be found at  The National Museum of Computing and is fondly referred to as Flossie. You can read all about the restoration of Flossie here.

Zoe’s Feather Boa also made me aware of a few Doctor Who appearances of the ICT1301 panels that I had missed. So here they are. 
MEGLOS, 1980
WARRIORS OF THE DEEP, 1984
THE TWIN DILEMMA, 1984

Around the time I heard from Bob and ZFB I also found a brilliant blog all about real world computers in film and television. It’s called Starring The Computer and here is their page on the ICT1301 They mention a bunch of other appearances for these panels across a range of shows. For other posts I have made, such as the statues from An Unearthly Child, I have tried to catalogue all instances of the use of those props. However that feels less important here as this was a real world mass produced item, not a prop. According to Wikipedia, 200 of these computers were created. So some of those extra appearances might be the same items as seen on Doctor Who, but equally they might be just another example of the same thing. So I’m not going to include all of them but here are a few of those appearances of the ICT1301.
BLAKES 7 / THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN / DOOMWATCH / THE MUPPET SHOW









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