Wherever you may live in the world, who do you wish to smile upon you and deliver good fortune? You may be surprised to discover that for a significant number of Brits this role is taken by someone called [Ernie].
What, [Jim Henson]’s Ernie from Sesame Street‘s famous duo Bert and Ernie? Sadly not, because the owner of a [Rubber Duckie] can’t offer you the chance of a million quid every month. Instead, [Ernie] is a computer that has been anthropomorphised in the national imagination. More properly referred to as E.R.N.I.E, for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment, he is the machine that picks the winning bond numbers for the Premium Bonds, a lottery investment scheme run by the British Government.
Brits have been able to buy £1 bonds, up to 50,000 of them today, since the 1950s, and every month they are entered into a drawing from which ERNIE picks the winners. The top two prizes are a million pounds, but for most bond holders the best they can hope for is the occasional £25 cheque. Premium Bonds are often bought for young children so a lot of Brits will have a few, often completely forgotten. Prizes never expire, so if you are the holder of old bonds you should consider asking National Savings and Investments whether anything is owed to you.
The Great Grandfather of Premium Bond Drawings
A significant effort was made to ensure that the draw was truly random, and the solution employed by [Flowers] and his team was thoroughly tested before each draw. The thermionic noise generated across a neon tube was sampled, and this random voltage delivered the truly random numbers used to generate the winning bond numbers. The machine’s construction is extremely reminiscent of its wartime predecessor, however it is as well to bear in mind that it owes this to the standard racking and paint used in British telephone exchanges of the day. Gone though are the octal tubes, and in their place are their more familiar miniature successors.
We have two films for you showing this incarnation of ERNIE in action. The first is a National Savings promotional film which explains ERNIE’s purpose, while the second shows us the Minister of the time starting the first draw. Believe it or not, this was a cause of major national excitement at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21sGqH5Gskw
This ERNIE was replaced in 1972 and given to the Science Museum in London. Meanwhile we’ve featured Colossus here, with our description last summer of the replica machine built by the National Museum Of Computing, at Bletchley Park.
By the way, if you are an ERNIE bond holder – Good luck!
I was going to say they could have done it with a geiger tube, 555, 4017s, and some passives, but then I paid attention to the date.
Nothing more than the occasional 25 quid here… :-(
not even the occasional 25 quid here lol
Me either…
I had 17 quid worth, bought for me as a kid in 1s and 2s.. Now, looked into it in the 90s and there was some stupidity where, they only became valid if I registered them at 18, but also some crap where there was now a minimum purchase or minimum registration amount of 50 quid. So it looked like I had to buy an additional 33 quid worth, (possibly 50) to enable validation and win anything at all. It was all very confusing the info available then, and it was unclear whether my 17 worth of numbers were actually included in any draw up until I was 18, and by lack of registering them or whatever after 18, whether they were entered after that. Additionally, at that point in time, it looked like you could only redeem them in 50 quid amounts… by mailing them off, but only if after 18 you’d registered them or some crap.
Still probably got them somewhere, every few years I pull them out and search winner database just in case, but it don’t look real hopeful.
Just looked up, it’s 100 minimum for a counter buy now, but you can buy 50 month with a standing order debit.
With a four and a half percent chance per hundred per annum, looks like I’ve had about a 30 percent chance of any win (Like mostly a 25 quid prize) in 40 years, so can’t quite call shenanigans on whether my numbers are in or not on that odds.
His name was Ernie, and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west.
(Sorry, it got stuck in my head as soon as I saw ERNIE. Nice article though. No idea where my bonds, bought in 1974, are.)
Sorry, did you have a point buried under all that racist drivel? Referring to a system of government that supports those not born wealthy as “corrupt communism” makes me think you’re American. If that’s correct, it hardly puts you in a position to refer to anyone else as dumb.
Z00111111 i believe your comment trumps tech benchie.
well said.
See ERNIE, see Colossus, see any British telephone exchange… The GPO have a lot to take credit for!
GP(I)O? :-)
For details see:
http://www.tnmoc.org/sites/default/files/Ernie-technology.pdf
“Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.”
–John von Neumann
That’s why it’s fed on noise. The current version presumably something even more sophisticated.
We have much better whitening these days so we can produce very good looking numbers with even poor random noise source.
Considering how few numbers they need to produce they have plenty of time to gain entropy and whiten it until it performs.
Jim Henson’s Ernie was random enough. Actually, every Ernie I’ve ever heard of has been a nearly constant source of randomness. There must be something special in the name. :-)
The irregularity of being Ernest.
Yea, thats another “random” Ernie or in this case Ernest as in “Earnest Saves Christmas”, “Earnest Scared Stupid”, “Earnest Goes to Camp”… I tell you, its something about the name. :-)
What? It’s a bond scheme. Citizens lend money to the government, by buying bonds. And instead of getting paid back with interest, the interest goes into a big pot, and they award prizes from it.
For the average citizen, the return on a few quid’s worth of bonds isn’t worth the money to invest. But if you make it into a lottery, there’s bigger prizes, and an element of chance. People are happy with that, we’d rather have a 1000:1 chance of winning 50 quid, than a certainty of 5p.
It’s a lottery, but you can always sell your bonds back to the government and get your stake back. And the same stake is entered for every draw. So it’s not a massive ripoff like actual lotteries.
Of course according to RW, a load of fuckers got into the system and changed the rules at some point. Nobody pays a lot of attention to Premium Bonds, which is why they hold on to any winnings for as long as it takes to claim them. Well, they did, maybe they’ve changed that too.
But back in the day it was a great idea.
Stick to RT.com mate.