I thiught it had been open longer than 24 nonths.
UK's National Museum of Computing celebrates 10 glorious years
The National Museum of Computing (TNMoC), which yesterday celebrated its tenth anniversary as an independent organisation, will this coming weekend formally inaugurate a new membership club for enthusiasts of Britain’s computing heritage, and supporters of the museum. The decade has not been without its growing pains, among …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 07:56 GMT GlenP
Having visited earlier in the year, and been slightly disappointed by TNMoC, I'm pleased they seem to be addressing things. Much of it still seemed to be an excuse for boys to play with their toys, with little interaction with the paying public (apart from the timed talks on the decryption side).
Glen
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 09:13 GMT TeeCee
Ah yes, ARM.
That'll be thing the thing that utterly dominates the mobile world, yes? And of course, most of the pundits reckon mobile devices will kill off everything else[1]. Most countries would cut off their left nut for a slice of that.
[1] It doesn't matter who says this or how often, it's still bollocks.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 08:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Visit!
I found the NMoC just great when I visited two years ago. Full of old kit I fondly remembered from my childhood, and full of enthusiastic folk to talk about it all too. They'd explained to me how a recent coding class of children loved the BBC Micro once they understood you could switch it on and immediately do something with it - no long boot times, no logins, no adverts on home screens etc...
No two ways about it, the museum is tatty as hell and needs some money spending on it; Bletchley park is also rather woebegone. But I'd rather it this way than some shiny 'digital multimedia experience environment' full of daft sound bites, patronising marketing and subject to the incessant and tiring dumbing down that pretty much every other place of education is suffering from. Not every museum has to look like an Apple Store after all.
If you're an IT geek, and of course you are - you're here, then definitely visit!
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 14:28 GMT werdsmith
Re: Visit!
No two ways about it, the museum is tatty as hell and needs some money spending on it; Bletchley park is also rather woebegone. But I'd rather it this way than some shiny 'digital multimedia experience environment' full of daft sound bites, patronising marketing and subject to the incessant and tiring dumbing down that pretty much
Errrm, 2 years ago you say?
Time for another look.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 09:09 GMT Bob Wheeler
Colossus
"The ten Colossi built between 1943 and 1945 and put to work at Bletchley Park were all dismantled and completely destroyed immediately after the conclusion of the conflict"
I'm sure I read/heard that after the war in 1945, not all of the Colossi where destroyed. but that some of them where moved to places such as RAF Eastcote and used by the American's for breaking of Soviet codes, as the Soviet's used the ex-German egnigma machines.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 09:43 GMT MrT
Re: Colossus
"Two were retained by the peace-time descendant of Bletchley Park, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)... The last Colossus is believed to have stopped running in 1960." B Jack Copeland, page 2 of his introduction to the excellent book Colossus, 2006, which includes chapters by Tutte, Flowers and plenty of others who where involved. There's one reference to post-war reprogramming on p139 (attributed to Geoffrey Timms). Colossus 2 was much more flexible in that respect than Mk1, although they were all basically development machines, with the last one being different from the one built before it, and so on.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 09:31 GMT John H Woods
Useful resource
My kids, on seeing a 3.5" 1.44 MB* disk in TNMoC: "OMG that's why that funny symbol means 'save', finally it all becomes clear!"
Just told this story to a co-worker. Her response? "OMG, it is! I never realised!"
$DEITY I'm old.
*ok it was actually 1.44 kilokibibytes (1.44 * 1000 * 1024) but that is what we used to call them, unless we were being risqué, then we called them 'stiffies'
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 20:20 GMT Corinne
Re: Background on RAF Eastcote - the orginal site for GCHQ!
Hmm, not 100% sure they have all their dates right in the history of Eastcote bit. I'm pretty sure there was at least 1 mainframe running George3 around 1984/5, running alongside the 2900 series machines. I worked for the DTI (as was) at that time, and everyone had to spend a couple of weeks there when they joined the IT department. Most of the mainframes ran from massive disc platters that needed to be swapped out, but the George 3 machine still used paper tape and I think there were still a couple of jobs then that used punched card too. I'm a bit vague on the actual details on how these big beasts ran - it WAS over 30 years ago & I was never into the big hardware tech!
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Tuesday 14th June 2016 16:23 GMT Alistair Mann
Re: Background on RAF Eastcote - the orginal site for GCHQ!
I was an AA for 18 months there in the late '80s, tending the mainframes, and they were certainly still using ICL/George. I don't remember the 2900s , but I do remember the 2966 drives.
Favourite memory: the emergency phone number list had The Black Horse local pub as the first number!
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 12:23 GMT Winkypop
Well worth a long detour...
I went well out of my way to see TMoC on a recent UK driving holiday.
I dragged the wife along as well, mind, she had no choice.
Great stuff, friendly people, could have chatted all day long.
I enjoyed it too.
: )
I am now the proud owner of a Colossus coffee mug!
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Visit Bletchley Park, TNMOC or both?
I was reading a year or two ago about how the adjacent Bletchley Park museum was seemingly a little antagonistic towards TNMOC and BP was busy dumbing down to be an "experience" for bored schoolkids en-route to the souvenir shop.
What's the current situation - as a boring old computer geek should I plan a visit to include both or just TNMOC?
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Friday 3rd April 2015 23:19 GMT Lars
Oh dear
"Colossus, the World’s first electronic digital programmable computer" as has been pointed out previosly was not " the World’s first electronic digital programmable computer". Zuse was the first, it's not that I don't uderstand the nationalistic problems of those years and the lack of information then, but facts are facts all the same, no need to commit suecide because of that. The first motorcycle is today 130 yesrs old no reason to commit suicide for that reason either, As a kid I had this feeling that the Russians claimed they had invented everything in this world and now I am confronted with adults as dumb in a western society.
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Sunday 12th April 2015 08:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
A correction...
"the EDSAC reconstruction project, an attempt to replicate Cambridge University’s ground-breaking stored-program computer, the first digital computer to provide computing as a service."
Actually, it was the second to do so. The Manchester Mark 1 was the first to provide a computing service - just pipped EDSAC to the post.
http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/computer50/www.computer50.org/mark1/MM1.html
states that the Intermediary Version "was available for general use by other university departments and Ferranti". The Intermediary Version was completed in April 1949, before EDSAC became operational in its original (also incomplete form) in May 1949.
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Wednesday 2nd March 2016 21:30 GMT Tom -1
Oh Dear @Lars
The Zuse's Z3 was not an electronic computer, the logic was electromechanical relays, not anything electronic. The Z4 prototype build was not completed until the sping of 1945, not many days before the end of the war in Europe, and 16 months after the first Colossus, so the Z3 is the only Zuse computer you can be referring to, and it wasn't an electronic computer at all.
The first programmable (not stored program) electronic digital computer Colossus, the first digital electronic computer was the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (which wasn't programmable), the first stored program electronic digital computer was the Manchester SSEM (ENIAC was earlier than the SSEM, but didn't support any stored program at first; a very limited stored program capability was added to ENIAC about 3 months after the SSEM was operational) and the first stored program electronic digital computer used to provide a computing service was the Manchester Mark 1 (which beat its rival, the Cambridge University EDSAC, by just one month).
That is all well known history, a matter of record. Claiming that something that wasn't electronic was the first programmable electronic computer isn't going to change that history.