The National Museum of Computing

[Lissa]

The National Museum of Computing is housed in one of the huts at Bletchley Park and is home to the reconstruction of Colossus - the world's first programmable electronic computer and a vital part of the Bletchley Park code breaking work during the war.



But it has grown beyond just the war time code cracking kit to give a history of computing from those early valve driven behemoths to the present day. I'll be writing about it in far more depth another time but here are a few highlights. It has an office room where early word processors and other workplace kit are on display. Including this odd looking contraption which has both a portrait screen (logical if you think it was designed for typing documents) and a CAT - the circular panel to the right of the keyboard which was a rival to the ultimately victorious mouse.



Not to be outdone by the wacky screen shape, this computer is built into the desk. One of the selling points is that the monitor could slide across the desk to be wherever you wanted it to be. As long as that was within the one foot range of movement.



There is an Apple Lisa - the ahead-of-its-time failure which did much to invent the modern GUI. This is just one of many Apple products on display (the time line of the museum ends with the iPhone which made me very happy). It's hard to believe something this small was so advanced and so expensive that it seemed like (expensive) magic a quarter of a century ago.



Now here's a shelf to thrill people of a certain age. A bunch of Spectrums, a BBC Micro with all the trimmings, an Amiga with the wacky coloured keys, a ZX81~! and possibly a Commodore 64 in there underneath. This is a shelving unit to show the children of today.



While the machines above are only for show, they do have working examples of half a dozen 80s classics. You can play Pac Man on the BBC Micro, Reversi on the Spectrum, play with a very primitive drawing package on a slightly later machine and watch an early example of a geometric screensaver on another.



It isn't just home and office machines - they have a HUGE mainframe contraption in another (very hot) room. I think this is just one computer. A girl came in while I was adoring it and said to her mother "Are those washing machines?" Meanwhile I was emailing my sidekick to tell him I was literally standing in the middle of an ICL system. He appreciated it.



There is so much great stuff at the NMOC but unfortunately they can only afford to open for a couple of afternoons a week (and that's stretching it). The cost of staffing and powering all these machines is hundreds of pounds per day so they have appeals for funds from people interested in the work they're doing in rescuing and restoring our computing past. If you'd like to donate anything they have a fund raising page here. They reckon that if everyone in this country who uses a computer today gave £1, they would have enough to keep the museum open and free in perpetuity.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I think I found my Gracelands! Wow - I'm now annoyed I'm on the other side of the world to this.

Thanks for sharing Lissa, and you don't think you deserve the title of IT Test Analyst proper!!!

[Rob McCow]

Oooo... that definitely looks worth a visit. I'll see if I can drag my geek buddies along.

[shada pavlova]

I went there a few years back as part of summer school.

I enjoyed it immensely.