The National Museum of Computing

HISTORY TELLS US that many of the major milestones in the development of technology throughout the 20th century happened in garden sheds and garages.

Henry Ford built his first car, the Quadricycle, in a converted storage shed in the back yard of his Detroit home. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak put together the first Apple computer in the garage of the Jobs family home in California. And Nigel Xerox invented the graphical user interface in his grandmother's coal bunker. Okay, we made that last one up. But you get the idea.

All of which makes it quite fitting that the UK's National Museum of Computing has been established in what is ostensibly a very large garden shed nestled in the grounds of the wartime code breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park.

The museum, which is home to many of the most important and pioneering computers ever built, is run by as enthusiastic a band of volunteers and trustees as you will find anywhere. Every one of them has a singular passion for the history of computing, and that passion is surprisingly infectious.

One of the facility's directors, Andy Clark, points out the ethos behind the exhibitions. "It's a museum of computing, not a museum of computers. It's not about looking at the boxes, it's about what the boxes can do. Every exhibit is fully operational and capable of doing the job for which it was designed," he said.

It's this ethos which keeps the volunteers extremely busy, repairing hardware, obtaining hard-to-find components from the most unlikely of sources, and rebuilding incredibly important historical computers from seemingly random boxes of un-catalogued bits and pieces in some cases. What would seem a daunting, if not impossible, task to many mere mortals is what keeps this band of beard-scratching boffins smiling.

They don't come much more beardy than Peter Onion, with his shock of long blonde hair and ZZ Top facial fuzz. Onion showed us his latest baby, an (almost) fully functioning Elliott 803B, with such pride that it was quite touching. The machine was found rusting in a breaker's yard around 15 years ago, and has been restored to such a high level that it could have been recently installed.

It is missing one of its data storage units, which uses traditional 35mm film coated with a magnetic emulsion made by Kodak, but it is still capable of burbling away to itself playing what we were reliably informed was music. Work continues on the system today and, if anyone has the second tape unit gathering dust in a store cupboard somewhere, we're sure the folks at Bletchley would be delighted to hear from you.

By far the largest system on display, an ICL 2966 from the early 1980s, looks to all the world like a launderette full of top-loading washing machines. Donated to the museum by Tarmac some 15 years ago, the system remained in storage until early 2008 when space was found to display around 40 per cent of the original components.

Anyone familiar with the inner workings of a modern hard drive will recognise the historical importance of this system, as its storage relies on a series of large layered disks with servo-powered read/write heads. The disk sets are removable and are stored in transparent plastic containers.

The surface of the disks is incredibly fragile and can be problematic, according to Clark. "These systems would have originally been housed in totally clean, dust-free environments, much the same as hard drive manufacturing facilities today," he told us. "We have to be really careful about handling the disks and eventually hope to house the exhibit in a clean room."

There is something charmingly British about the way these systems are displayed. Many of the exhibits are 'hands on' and visitors are encouraged to get involved at many levels. The few 'Do not touch' signs in evidence are taped to consoles in a haphazard manner. Most are there to prevent visitors getting a 450V surprise rather than to prevent grubby fingerprints.

Barriers are few and far between, and those that you do encounter are home-made from off-cuts of timber, cup hooks and string. If this museum was in America, or even London, it would be all touch-screen this and interactive that, and you wouldn't be able to get within 15 feet of a genuine piece of computing history.

But here at Bletchley this fascinating collection has been set up by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. You get the distinct impression that the volunteers, perhaps resigned to the fact that the vast majority of their visitors have wandered into the museum having exhausted the admittedly fascinating code-breaking exhibitions next door, get genuinely excited when someone with the vaguest interest in computing arrives.

The simplest of questions sends volunteers scurrying off in all directions, returning moments later with defunct and occasionally smouldering components, circuit diagrams and fragments of ancient punch tape.

Stacks of storage cabinets hide non-public areas of the facility where tantalising glimpses of piles of machinery, components and nondescript boxes bulging with forbidden electronic treasures are guaranteed to send your average computer nerd into a frenzy of curiosity.

And the denizens of the displays get really excited talking about their latest acquisition, a system they hope will become the oldest operational computer in the world. The Harwell computer, which arrived safely from its storage facility somewhere in the Midlands just days before our visit, has everyone at the museum in a froth of excitement.

The massive array of Meccano, vacuum tubes and dizzyingly complex wiring looms sits statuesquely behind one of the aforementioned barriers. Caked in the grime of decades, and smelling faintly of overheated copper wiring, the Harwell waits patiently for the museum's eager volunteers.

"It's been in storage since the 1970s, and it will probably take us more than a year to make sense of it, but we'll get there in the end," enthuses Onion, eyeing the silent grey behemoth with the kind of affection usually displayed by doting mothers.

"We are currently deciding how much of what is present is original and what has been added at a later date," he tells us, pointing out dozens of wiring looms as fat as a baby's arm, which have quite obviously been upgraded or repaired at some point.

"The biggest problem we have is deciding at which point in the computer's history we base the restoration. We have some circuit diagrams, and a few photographs, but we don't know when they were produced. It's all a bit of a jigsaw," he said.

The team will no doubt be helped enormously by three of the original designers who have established contact with the museum since the restoration project was announced, but there is still a mountain to climb.

There are visible signs of damage to many of the vacuum tubes which act as the computer's memory array and, although these are apparently still being manufactured, they don't come cheap. Heat and time have also taken their toll on much of the intricate wiring, and it will take many long months of toil before the system can be powered up. Even then, the team will need to be sure to have plenty of fire extinguishers on hand.

"We have had machines burst into flames before now," said one volunteer, grinning sheepishly.

In the meantime, some of the team are working on coding a Harwell emulator based on the original circuit diagrams. With some reverse engineering jiggery pokery, the programmers are hoping to use the emulator to predict potential problems and analyse faults prior to boot-up.

Although the museum's main focus is on the pioneering computers that started the whole digital ball rolling, one recently opened addition to the many exhibits is the Personal Computing Gallery. It's a bit flashier than some of the other areas, and makes an effort to be interactive without going too far.

This really is personal computing 'Nerdvana', and we couldn't help ourselves from chanting the mantra: "Had one of those, had one of those, still got one of those, really wanted one of those but my mum wouldn't buy it..." along with every other visitor.

Everything from the Sinclair ZX81 through the BBC Micro, past the Amiga and onto modern Macs and PCs is represented, and there is even a display charting the history of hand-held computing.

There is also an Air Traffic Control simulator including real-time data from nearby Luton Airport, and plans are afoot for a number of new galleries, including one which will contain office desk set-ups from various bygone decades. But the biggest draw for most visitors, and the one part of the museum which is open every day, is the room which houses the Colossus.

This beast of a machine is considered by many to be the first of the electronic digital machines with programmability. There were others before it, but this was the first to be digital, programmable and electronic. The machine on display is a rebuild of one of the original machines sited at Bletchley, and took over 10 years and around 6,000 man hours to finish. The computer was used to break Nazi codes during the war and was so secret that it was not included in the history of computing for many decades after the end of WW2.

Bletchley Park director Simon Greenish told us: "This is really the birthplace of the modern computer. It was here that the clever people, including famous names like Alan Turing, developed technology to automate code breaking, and that ultimately led to Colossus, which was used to find the wheel settings of the incredibly complex encoding machine the Lorenz SZ42. They didn't call it a computer in those days. It was essentially a machine to do a specific job. But it was a computer and is recognised now as the world's first."

The whole project was put together using just eight wartime photographs taken in 1945, a few fragments of circuit diagrams which had been sneakily lifted by the original project engineers despite the massive secrecy, and the help and advice of Henry Fensom, one of the men who built the computer first time around.

So there you have it. One of the most complete collections of historical computers in the world operated by a dedicated team of enthusiasts and volunteers in a beautiful country park setting. Throw in the code-breaker exhibits, a model railway, and a gallery stuffed full of wartime toys and memorabilia, and you've got a pretty good day out in our book... and all for a tenner.

Details on the museum's opening hours and entrance fees can be found here.

L'Inq
The National Museum of Computing