I was sceptical before we left because although I'm sure you could spend the whole day in a museum you can’t be interested in everything. I was pleasantly surprised when we got there because it isn't just a small but dedicated computing museum, it was a great big museum surrounded by other museums.
The people who led us on the tour were really knowledgeable and I liked the way the displays weren’t just displays. You could interact with most of the items and everything in the museum works, every single bit of it! Of course, having that many computers and other devices connected to the power supply every day would be wasteful so not all of it was on, but it was amazing to know that if you wanted it to see something in particular in action, they could just flip the switch.
Of course we had to go and see the rebuilt Turing Bombe machine which works, it’s much bigger than I thought it was. Close-to the Bombe was a wealth of information about Alan Turing, centred on a sculpture of him made of stacked slate shipped from North Wales. It was very detailed, down to the mug that’s chained to the desk highlighting his high work ethic. A section of the hall was dedicated to the events leading up to his suicide and the social ramifications of being homosexual in the 20th Century. There is a personally signed copy of the famous ‘Apology’ by Gordon Brown from 2009 and I was very moved when I read it and the other documents on display.
One thing that sticks in my memory very well is the wealth of Acorn computers. Not because they were particularly amazing, although they were very difficult to look at with their small, bright screens. The reason that I remember the Acorn so well is because we had the opportunity to copy a page of code from paper into the machine by hand in order to make a game that was a little ‘snake’ appear on the screen.
On the tables in that room they had all these old magazines that you used to be able to buy in shops and kids would copy out pages of code so that they could play games on their computer. It must have been very frustrating and time consuming, one comma in the wrong place and you’re done for. And you can’t use the backspace key; if you notice that you’ve got a bit wrong you have to copy out the whole line again!
Going back to the bright screens of the Acorn, there’s one set of displays that makes very good use of those colours. I don’t know what to call that display but there are lots of techni-colour 80s computer games set up on the screens and music that sounds like it’s from the one of the original Nintendo games by a group called ‘Pixelh8′. There’s a time-line of computer history which also shows world events and I was surprised at how the two time-lines tied together.
We also played with some newer technology, like the BBC Doomsday project with the touch screens. There were all these photos of my home town from 1986 and maps showing the changes to the landscape over the past 30 years.
I learned a lot about the history of computing today and the things I already knew have been put into context for me. I wouldn’t mind going back to the computing museum. Even though we were there for the whole day there was much more to see. And Bletchley Park in general has a lot of stuff going on.
Originally Written for University of Buckingham Blog: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/appliedcomputing/news/bletchley-park2012
