The iconic Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia has witnessed the birth and death of star systems, unravelled cosmic mysteries and even relayed the first live TV pictures of astronauts on the Moon.

The walls of the doughnut-shaped control room underneath the vast 64-metre-wide dish are lined with racks of equipment. There are cabinets of flashing LEDs, switches, dials, and stacks of processors and hard-drives. Since its first observations in 1961, the technology has been continuously upgraded. Well, most of it.

“We’ve recently upgraded the computer,” says operations scientist John Sarkissian from the Australian national science agency, Csiro (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation). “We’ve stuck an Apple sticker on it.”

The computer in question is used to manoeuvre the Parkes dish with pinpoint accuracy to detect radio signals from distant galaxies. But this Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP 11 was built long before any modern incarnation of a Mac.