Write a short note to a friend, translate its voice to the early 1960s, and send it through a punched-tape machine inspired by the Ferranti Sirius.
Your everyday words are adapted into a gentle 1960s letter—keeping your exact meaning without adding invented promises or events.
You may review or edit every line above before encoding it onto punched paper tape.
A contemporary interactive apparatus inspired by the 1962 Ferranti Sirius — designed to guide visitors into the story, not an exact physical replica.
Drag the paper tape leftward out of the slot—or press and hold “Hold to Pull”—to feed characters into memory.
[ Pull the paper tape above to reveal the message waiting inside... ]
Beyond the interactive letter sits a milestone of early British transistor computing—quiet enough for an ordinary office, clever enough to store memory as sound.
Built by Ferranti Ltd. in Manchester between 1958 and 1962, the Sirius replaced glowing vacuum tubes with compact transistors. It needed no special air conditioning and plugged into standard office mains—bringing digital computing out of giant air-conditioned halls.
In 1962, you did not type directly into live screen editors. Programs, calculations, and messages were punched as 5-hole patterns onto paper strips using an offline teleprinter, then fed through a photoelectric reader into the Sirius.
Rather than expensive magnetic core arrays, the Sirius stored numbers inside nickel magnetostrictive acoustic delay lines—sending mechanical ripples around a coil of wire and re-amplifying them endlessly so memory would not fade.