Bletchley Park / National Museum of Computing
Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2023 9:09 am
For Christmas my wife got us tickets to visit Bletchley and the National Museum of Computing (pretty much next door). We stayed overnight at a B&B nearby, and it's a good thing we did as there was too much to do to do it all in a single day.
I can highly recommend it to anyone who has not already been to Bletchley. It's one of the best experiences of the kind that I have ever seen. It felt quite strange walking around the grounds, huts and manor house, almost sensing the WW2 staff and codebreakers around you. When you hear and read of the details of their accomplishments, it's truly inspiring.
The computing museum has working replicas of the Turing-Welchman Bombe and Tommy Flowers' Colossus computers (as well as its Robinson predecessor). Really astonishing what they came up with given the materials that they had to hand. The volunteers who run it are all so passionate and full of knowledge.
Also there are computers from the 60, 70s and 80s, many of which I'd never seen other than online or magazines, such as an Apple Lisa, Camputers Lynx, PDP/8 etc.
As an aside, the QL sort of makes an appearance there in the form of 2 OPDs and some QL World magazines
https://bletchleypark.org.uk/
https://www.tnmoc.org/
I can highly recommend it to anyone who has not already been to Bletchley. It's one of the best experiences of the kind that I have ever seen. It felt quite strange walking around the grounds, huts and manor house, almost sensing the WW2 staff and codebreakers around you. When you hear and read of the details of their accomplishments, it's truly inspiring.
The computing museum has working replicas of the Turing-Welchman Bombe and Tommy Flowers' Colossus computers (as well as its Robinson predecessor). Really astonishing what they came up with given the materials that they had to hand. The volunteers who run it are all so passionate and full of knowledge.
Also there are computers from the 60, 70s and 80s, many of which I'd never seen other than online or magazines, such as an Apple Lisa, Camputers Lynx, PDP/8 etc.
As an aside, the QL sort of makes an appearance there in the form of 2 OPDs and some QL World magazines
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
https://bletchleypark.org.uk/
https://www.tnmoc.org/