Portrait of world's oldest computer rediscovered in Manchester cafe

A long-lost portrait of a historic computer – built in 1951 and now the oldest working digital computer in the world – has resurfaced on a cafe bar wall in Manchester. The artist John Yeadon first saw the Witch (the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell) in 1982 in the Museum of Science and Industry in Birmingham. He was fascinated, even though it had become a sad ghost of its former glory at the cutting edge of computing technology. He tried to capture its character – which he described as a "diabolical contraption, a dusty hunk of electric and mechanical hardware that reminded me of the disturbing 1950's Quatermass science fiction television series" – in a near-lifesize two metre by three metre Portrait of a Dead Witch, which he also intended as a joke about the contemporary craze for computer-generated art. He described it as a portrait rather than a still life: "I think I had some idea that the painting brought the computer back to life, or at least to another life."