John V Attanasoff and his student Berry had already built the world's first electronic digital programmable computer in Ames, Iowa before the code-breaking machines were built in England.

Seems like I've found yet another "must see" next time I visit England.
This one seems very easy to reach even if I spend the nights in central London.

Cheers
Olle

I remember being taken to the computer department at Smith Industries in cheltenham when i was about 10 by my next door neighbour. They had loads of those ICL washing machine hardrive there and the whole room really did look like something out of 2001. It left a huge impression on me, and now seeing them in in a museum make me feel very old (36). I remeber looking on in awe as i was told about the fact they had several hundred megs of storage available to them, this was around the time i got my BBC B when 32k of ram seems pretty special. Isnt Moore´s law an incredible thing. I remember when i got my first pc around 95 thinking i had more hardrive space than that whole room, it think it had a 4 gig hardrive. At that i probably had way more computing power.

The times they are a changing

For the sake of global warming, this sort of wasteful usage of electricity needs to made an example of. The organizers of the museum should be sent to left wing anti capitalist reeducation camps and forced to watch Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.

The Harwell computer is British, so please use the correct term. Vacuum tube is American. Here we called them thermionic valves, or more usually simply valves.

Past comments notwithstanding, I applaud the efforts of the restorers and hope their efforts continue to bear fruit.

This is a highly worthwhile endeavor, and all British schoolchildren should have the opportunity to visit and learn.

Enthusiastic and electrostatic... No doubt drinking the Lever Set "Gang" Punch.

When will they get the IBM Kittyhawk kit?

That would really fly.

Oh. We'll guess I drink the koolaid.

Well beyond Grad Students, More time in design & assembly than useage. Useful in stopping hordes of Theiving Accountants.

Most Machines where left in Boxes came from some far off factory in. By 1960s', Telco roam every night thru private data banks, seeking, seeking....

Records are so secured on persons entire self, medical, financial, property- You name It, theres little else except mindless bumbling public computer so wistfully tracks.

Wire leads to group of wires & timer(Rotating Cylinder with contacts becomes trasnistor beds) , each like capacitor, goes on or stays off, if voltage is present when line is connected, voltage passses thru that line, none of other off lines. Its volt/No Volt situation thruout. | | | | | || | |||| MIGHT BE EXAMPLE OF SIGNAL, with each space being moment one wire is available & | being moment voltage is being applied. Programing beast, let alone running at incredible speeds with powerful modulation is Long Time Coming. Public gets wonderful interactive experience Today, yet Telco still gets YOU.

DRASHEK

I don't think many of us truly appreciate how quickly computing technology improves. Barring a war, a famine, or some other horrible worldwide disaster, technology tends to continuously improve over time. Many of us will already know that microchips tend to double in density about every 1.5-2 years, hard drives every year or so, flash drives about every 9 months according to what I've read. But EVERYTHING tends to do this. Food prices tend to decrease by about 1% a year, though we don't really notice it because of a combination of inflation and the various improvements in quality that ratchet the price back up. Medical technology continues to improve. Knowledge of the human brain continuously accelerates, and pretty much everything else continues to improve. (Except government of course, that seems to be going backwards)

It is a truly awesome world we live in, and sometimes it just pays to sit back and consider the age we live in. :)

The EDS 200 HDD looks like a washing machine! I just can’t help to wonder the capacity of the Grand daddy of HDD’s :)

how could you miss the famous California Historic monument which is the HP Garage
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/garage/

Most of that great old was well built and didnt break, thats way its still here.
I like the fact you can see what the machine is doing. Now you just look at very inanimate chilps and really have no idea whats going on inside. I do have a ruff idea of how computers work, but its hard to fathom without looking at moving parts.I can look at an old watch with a balance staff a gears and see whats going on. The fact is only a few specialised people know whats going on and thats why all this new tehnolohy kind of bothers me.
A couple of years ago I saw a very old commerical hdd. It was at least 12 inches in diamater and was a whooping 40mb's!My how things have changed.

It is, of course, an absolute disgrace that none of the enormous amount of taxes being wasted by the Government is diverted into Bletchley Park.

It should be treated with the utmost respect by anyone who realises what Turing and his colleagues did for us.

I would love to be able to see I've seen the NMOC, but it's only open a couple of days a week(*), so all I got to see was their COLOSSUS.

It's probably obvious, but I had no idea what sort of heat a valve powered computer generates.

(*) Of course, Bletchley Park is, above all else, British, so entry tickets are, in fact, annual passes, so sooner or later I'll revisit them.