I've been digging into the history of early computing in East Africa and the story of the first real computer we ever got is genuinely unhinged.

The machine was an ICT 1202, a valve computer that arrived in Nairobi around 1960 for the East African Railways and Harbours. Valve computers ran on thousands of vacuum tubes. 

The problem was that switching them all on at once drew so much current that the local electrical substation couldn't handle it alongside the bakery up the road running its overnight ovens. So every morning a part-time employee (a police officer) would call the bakery, wait for confirmation that the ovens were off, and spend thirty minutes carefully starting the machine in sequence to spread the load.

That was the least weird part.

One night a puff adder came in through the crawl space under the building and coiled itself on top of the drum memory unit, the warmest spot in the machine. The next morning the guy doing the startup opened the cabinet door and found himself face to face with a puff adder rearing to strike. He happened to be carrying his service pistol that day because there had been some trouble in the area. The snake lunged, he jumped back, drew the pistol and fired.

He missed the snake and hit the drum memory.

The snake disappeared. The man was fine but computer was finished.

Then it got bureaucratic. The machine was leased from a private company(ICT), so now that the government was done with it, import duty became payable on it as a commercial import. The duty on several tons of specialist hardware, even wrecked, was substantial. The workaround: it didn't have to go back to the UK, it just had to leave Kenyan territory. So they loaded it onto a train to Mombasa, transferred it to a barge, towed it out beyond the three mile limit in the presence of official Customs and Excise witnesses, and tipped it into the Indian Ocean. Sitting somewhere under a few hundred feet of water about five miles east of Kilindini to this day.

The replacement was an ICT 1500, transistorized, same generation as the Apollo guidance computers. Massive leap forward and ... no more waiting for a bakery.

I have a detailed post going up on the full story, from the valve era through the transistor generation and some wild connections to Silicon Valley [here](https://jkitsao.substack.com/p/east-africas-first-computers). 





The first computer in East Africa had to wait for a bakery to finish baking before it could be switched on