Another nominee for the Tony Sale award was this restoration of the 1940s electromechanical calculator Z3.

Work on the reconstructed machine - seen here - was initiated by Professor Raúl Rojas, of Freie Universität, Berlin, and Dr Horst Zuse, of Technische Universität, Berlin.

The great, grandaddy of the modern computer, the Z3 was the first working machine whose processing architecture resembled that of a modern computer.

Just like today's PCs the Z3 had a CPU where arithmetic was carried out, memory in which to store data, was programmable via its tape reader, and had a unit to display the output of its calculations. The other thing that that it had in common with today's computers was that it used binary to carry out its calculations - which greatly simplified the structure of its components. The memory was made up of 2,600 telephone relays - basically electromechanical switches that could represent binary 0s and 1s - that allowed it to handle 64 22-bit numbers.

The Z3 was the world's first operational general-purpose program-controlled calculator and was used by the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter to aid aircraft design during the Second World War. Unfortunately the Z3 was a casualty of the war, and was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin.