The ICL User Command Console 7500 stands as a successful, utilitarian machine that accompanied a range of popular, British-designed mainframe computers during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then it has been granted a second life with the help of James Ball, the digital art director behind a new photography series called Guide to Computing, which celebrates early computers via careful archival photography and painstaking retouching: ‘Dials and buttons, knobs and switches; they’re very charming’ says Ball.