[GreenKeys] The National Museum of Computing

[Gabriel Egan]

Christian Gauger-Cosgrove wrote about the
National Museum of Computing adjacent to
Bletchley Park in England:

 > (TNMOC: The people with the working Colossus;
 > and who are currently rebuilding EDSAC.)
 > TNMOC is awesome

I can confirm this -- I was there yesterday as
a 50th-birthday treat and despite clearly
limited resources the Museum is deeply facinating,
with knowledgeable people on had to demonstrate
working vintage machines.

The highlight for me was the Harwell Dekatron
computer built in 1949 by the Atomic Energy Research
Establishment and later donated to Wolverhampton
Technical College to become the Wolverhampton
Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell
(WITCH).

The WITCH is still running, making it the oldest
working computer in the world. Yesterday it was
running a program to print a table of squares and
had been doing so for several hours when I saw it.
The machine counts in decimal not binary and uses
the Dekatron tubes for memory and electrical
relays for logical operations. Doubtless the
fact that you can read the contents of the
memory locations with the naked eye--by which
of the glowing gas elements in each Dekatron
tube is lit up--made the machine especially
suited to teaching computing.

Bletchley Park has the nicer grounds for picnicking
in, but the National Museum of Computing has the
better displays, in my view.

Gabriel Egan