As a child, our house would occasionally receive a letter from what we called ‘Uncle Ernie’. It was, of course, news that someone in the family had won a prize in the UK Premium Bonds – state sanctioned personal savings meets moderate gambling. The numbers were picked not by an uncle, but by a computer, specifically the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment.

This wardrobe-like computer isn’t actually E.R.N.I.E. – it’s the prototype that was built in the 1950s to demonstrate how the system would eventually work. So maybe the bigger machine could actually have been known as Uncle Ernie? The prototype was reconstructed by the museum in 2017.