A working round-screened air traffic control station and
a reborn 1980s ICL 2900 workhorse mainframe are among the
attractions lined up for the new National Museum of Computing, which is being
set up this year.
The star attraction is the world’s first digital computer, the
wartime codebreaking machine Colossus, restored and recently
transported back to its birthplace at Bletchley Park, the site of
the museum.
The facility is being developed by the Codes and Ciphers
Heritage Trust in partnership with the Bletchley Park Trust and it
is supported by the British Computer Society.
In January, the BCS helped secure the future of the Colossus
with a £75,000 donation. “Colossus is a genuine milestone in
computing history – not just in terms of the crucially important
role it played in winning the Second World War, but also how it
paved the way for the future of computing,” said BCS president
Nigel Shadbolt.
The museum will show how the painstaking work of the Bletchley
Park codebreakers to crack first the Enigma and then the Lorenz
machine gave rise to the age of digital computing.
The museum will follow the development of computing from the
ultra-secret pioneering efforts of that time, through the
mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal
computing in the 1980s.
Colossus is already open to the public, who can see
demonstrations of how the computer cracked a
German encrypted message during the Second World War.
www.bletchleypark.org.uk
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