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Exhibits

The exhibits on display in the museum are only a fraction of the collection, but are chosen to tell the story of computing developments in Britain. There a number of galleries which can be visited in a broadly chronological sequence, starting with the working replicas of WWII machines that were developed and used by Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Rebuilt Bombe

This gallery tells the story of Cryptanalysis of the Enigma. Enigma machines were used by the Germans before and during WWII for sending secret messages. Alan Turing further developed, and Gordon Welchman enhanced, an idea develped by Polish codebreakers of a machine to assist in decrypting Enigma messages.[1] This gallery houses a fully working replica of a Bombe machine, a working replica Enigma and various related artefacts.

The replica Bombe was built by a team led by John Harper following the release in 1995 to the Bletchley Park Trust of some 2,000 BTM documents and drawings relating to the Bombes that they had built during the war.[2] The replica is owned and managed by the Turing-Welchman Bombe Rebuild Trust, which provides and trains the volunteers who run and demonstrate the machine to visitors on a regular basis.[3]

Tunny and Colossus Galleries

Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine
Tony Sale supervising the breaking of an enciphered message using the completed Colossus rebuild.

Separate from the Enigma story is the less well-known one of the diagnosing and deciphering of messages produced by the more secure 12-rotor Lorenz SZ teleprinter cipher attachments, which is told in these two galleries.[4] The Tunny galley exhibits one of the very few Lorenz SZ42 machines still in existence — something that the Bletchley Park team did not see until after Nazi Field Marshal Albert Kesselring surrendered in May 1945, shortly before VE-day.

'Tunny' was the name given to the messages, to the unseen cipher machine and to the British-built emulator of it. The gallery shows the visitor a reproduction of part of the original Lorenz listening station at Knockholt in Kent, with its multiple RCA AR-88 radio receivers,[5] pen recorders (undulators) and the sort of paper tape and teleprinter equipment that was used to record the messages and transmit them to Bletchley Park. Also on display is a working replica of a British Tunny machine that exactly emulated the Lorenz machine and a working replica of the Heath Robinson machine, the forerunner of Colossus.

The Colossus gallery houses the fully working rebuild of a Colossus Mark 2. During his work to save Bletchley Park, Tony Sale recognised the pioneering nature of the ten Colossus machines that had been designed and built during WWII to assist in breaking messages enciphered by the Lorenz machines.[6] He and his team spent 14 years from 1993 in building this machine[7] with its 2,420 valves (vacuum tubes) and its programmability by switches and patch leads. It is a reproduction of what is arguably the world’s first large-scale, programmable electronic computer.

There are a number of related artefacts in this gallery.

This gallery continues the story of valve or tube-based computers and exhibits three large machines and many other related items. The three unique large machines are:

  • EDSAC – a replica nearing completion. The machine is owned and managed by the EDSAC Replica Project,[8] which provides and trains the volunteers who are building it and, eventually, will run and demonstrate it.
The original EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was constructed by the Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory under Sir Maurice Wilkes.[9] Wilkes had read John von Neumann's seminal paper First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and attended the Moore School Lectures in Summer 1946. Starting in 1947, he designed and built the machine to serve a user community from many different departments of the university. The EDSAC ran its first programs on 6 May 1949 is therefore to be being the first practical general-purpose stored-program electronic computer.
The vast increase in computing power that EDSAC and its successor EDSAC 2 supplied, contributed to the winning of three Nobel Prizes – John Kendrew and Max Perutz (Chemistry, 1962) for the discovery of the structure of myoglobin, Andrew Huxley (Medicine, 1963) for quantitative analysis of excitation and conduction in nerves and Martin Ryle (Physics, 1974) for the development of aperture synthesis in radio astronomy. All acknowledged EDSAC in their Nobel Prize speeches.[10]
  • Harwell Dekatron[11] (aka the WITCH) from 1951. The world’s oldest original working digital computer.[12] Planned in 1949 to automate the tedious work performed by teams of bright young graduates using mechanical calculators. Simplicity, reliability and unattended operation were the design priorities. Speed was a lesser consideration. This pioneering computer first ran in 1951 and by 1952 was using 828 Dekatron tubes for program and data storage, relays for sequence control and valve-based electronics for calculations. When it was pitched against a human mathematician to check the machine’s operation, the human kept up with it for 30 minutes, but then retired exhausted as the machine carried on remorselessly. It once ran unattended for ten days over a Christmas/New Year holiday period.
It was used at AEA Harwell until 1957, when a competition was held for colleges to see who could make best use of it. The competition was won by Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College (later becoming Wolverhampton University) and they gave it its second name of the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell). The WITCH was used in computer education for over 15 years until 1973.
For a while the machine was on display at Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry, following which it was disassembled and put into storage at Birmingham City Council Museums’ Collection Centre. In 2009 the machine was spotted by TNMOC volunteers who recognised what it was, and made a plan to bring it to TNMOC for restoration in full public view. This was completed in 2012.[13]
HEC was based on an original design by Andrew Booth of Birkbeck College, London University.[15] His design for a small scientific computer was adapted by Raymond Bird at BTM in 1951 to become a prototype commercial computer designed to work with the punched card equipment familiar to BTM's customers. The first production machine was delivered early in 1955, and the subsequent 1200 series of computers were highly successful.

The HEC and EDSAC had a huge bearing on the development of computing in the UK. In particular, EDSAC led directly to LEO, the world’s first computer to run a business. The WITCH had less influence on the development of computers but in the 1960s and 1970s, and again now, is a great educational tool.

Among the smaller items are several from the productive partnership between the Victoria University of Manchester and the electrical engineering company Ferranti. These include:

This gallery contains many machines of the 1960s, -70s and -80s and one or two from the 1990s. The magnetic disc units for these machines require specially filtered and temperature-controlled air which is not available in the 1944 building. Instead, volunteers have built solid-state virtual discs. All the large machines are in working order and include:

  • Elliott 803.[20][21] one of the first UK all transistor machines from around 1962. Despite having spent about 15 years in a farm barn, it was restored to working order and it is now used to play music, draw graphs on a Calcomp plotter and solve mathematical problems.
  • Elliott 903[22] which first came into production in 1965. It is an 18 bit discrete component machine typically equipped with 8 or 16K of core store memory. As a desk-sized machine it was popular with universities and colleges as a teaching machine, with small research laboratories as a scientific processor and also as a versatile system for use in industrial process control. The machine was usually programmed in symbolic assembly code, ALGOL or FORTRAN II. The machine on display was kindly donated to the museum in 2011 by the late Oliver Harlow, who had the machine in storage for many years and then used it from the 1970s into the 1980s.
  • IBM 1130[23] introduced in 1965. This is a rare surviving IBM computer — as most were leased, and scrapped at end of lease period. An estimated 10,000 systems are believed to have been built during a working life spanning nearly 20 years.[24] IBM 1130s for the US market were manufactured at in San Jose, but for the rest of the world they were manufactured in Greenock, Scotland.[25]
As well as being used in small to medium sized offices, it was also used extensively in colleges and universities for both scientific and 'office' roles. A binary 16-bit machine, it was marketed to price-sensitive, computing-intensive technical markets, like education and engineering.[26]
The machine currently running at TNMOC is on long term loan from Liverpool University who purchased it in 1968. After a period of non-academic use it was transferred to the Nuclear Physics Department around 1982 where it was used to digitise bubble chamber trace photos produced at CERN. Before it arrived at the museum, it had been in storage for over 25 years.
  • ICL 2966 (1970s/1980s) This huge machine — occupying almost a third of the floor space of the gallery — is a true mainframe which is rare sight today. ICL was formed in 1968 from the merger of ICT and EEC. It produced the 2900 Series as a successor to the 1900 Series and System 4 ranges. The design was influenced by many sources, particularly the Manchester University MU5. The system provided a Virtual Machine Environment (VME) operating system and the ability to run 1900 Series computer software.[27]
The museum's 2966 was donated by Tarmac who used it as a 1900 until it was decommissioned in 1999, due in part, to fears that it would be affected by the ′Millennium Bug′. Almost all large mainframes were broken up for scrap when they reached the end of their working lives, but Tony Sale, one of the founders of the Computer Conservation Society (CCS), who was directing the Colossus Rebuild, managed to persuade ICL to pay for its transport to Bletchley Park.
Nearly ten years passed before The National Museum of Computing was formed and the system was taken out of storage and set up in the new Large Systems Gallery in 2008. Unfortunately the damp conditions in the semi-derelict buildings that the machine lived in for so many years have taken their toll. The long and difficult process of restoring the system to working order has been underway since then. The system didn't include any video terminals, but three original ICL terminals were acquired and restored. The machine is run as a 1900 under the George 3 operating system. Visitors can now use the terminals to play noughts and crosses against the computer, or to explore the twisty windy passages of the classic Colossal Cave adventure game.[28]

This small gallery is used for a variety short-term exhibitions.

This gallery exhibits a variety of items including:[29]

  • A chart of programming languages, which shows the ancestors of those used by today's programmers, and covers much of one wall.
  • A display demonstrating the pervasiveness of software in the home
  • A ′cutaway PC′ showing the internal components and connections between them.
  • A robotics display with a robot originally produced for the 1980's BBC Micro now powered by a more modern machine.
  • A computer language database to which visitors can add.

This gallery exhibits many of the familiar home and business computers of the 1980s and 1990s.[30] Visitors can play some of the popular home computer games of the time as well. On show are, amongst others:

  • An early desktop PDP-8 from the 1960s.
  • Examples of early self-build machines from Nascom, Altair, Sinclair.
  • Popular home and and business computers from IBM, Apple, Acorn, Commodore, Atari including the now famous NeXTcube similar to the one on which Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser. This is not the actual one — which belongs to CERN — which is on loan to the Science Museum, London.
  • A display showing the evolution of portable computers, the earliest of which were described as ″Desktops with a Handle″. Examples are shown from Osborne, IBM, Kaypro, Amstrad and others. These were used primarily for business applications.
  • A timeline of world events contemporaneous with these developments.

Exhibition space

Various substantial exhibitions reside here for periods of months or years.

  • The National Air Traffic Services (NATS) used to have its engineering training college at Bletchley Park. It provided an exhibition in this gallery which used the equipment — with its panoramic three-screen display — that was actually used to train air traffic controllers.
  • Following that there was an exhibition entitled "Flowers to Fibre" that was developed jointly by the museum and the Communications Museum Trust. Tommy Flowers — of Colossus fame — and his successors at the General Post Office (GPO) and British Telecom (BT) worked for half a century starting in 1947 to enhance the speed and reliability of the existing copper voice network. The exhibition took visitors on a journey through the story from the first pilots of the prototype digital exchanges, to the planned national switch from copper to fibre after 2025.
  • In September 2024 an exhibition commemorating the 60th Anniversary Exhibition of Digital Equipment Corp's (DEC) presence in the United Kingdom was opened here. Their offices were in Reading and this exhibition was developed in collaboration with Reading Museum, DEXODUS,[31] and DECUS. It provides the visitor with a unique opportunity to delve into the rich history of DEC in the UK.

This gallery covers a wide range of systems that were used in some way to simulate a reality. These include:

  • A Cray-1 supercomputer used used to simulate weather patterns and nuclear reactions.
  • Games consoles trying to render artificial virtual worlds. Using these, visitors can play some of the early computer games, including Space Invaders.
  • Silicon Graphics workstations used to view 3-D crystalline models.
  • Analogue computers used to simulate real world actions like dampening springs in a suspension system.

Innovation Hub and BBC Classroom

These are two adjacent and interconnected education areas. The Innovation Hub was equipped by Fujitsu as part of its Education Ambassador Programme. It contains an array of Fujitsu technology including tablets, hybrid devices, laptops and desktop PCs.

Next door is the BBC Classroom which contains a large set of working vintage BBC Micro computers. This machine was the winning design for the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project[32] and was first demonstrated by Acorn Computers in 1981. The resulting series of computers became a mainstay of British schools in the 1980s. More than 1.5 million were sold, and their rugged design ensured that they survived the school environment. This classroom is used for workshops, activities and talks for a wide range of groups including school and academic groups, families and special interest groups.

This gallery was sponsored by the UK's National Physical Laboratory.[33] It tells the story of how, in 1965, a member of the team there that was responsible for building Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) — Donald Davies — thought of the idea of a network of inter-connected data terminals to access it. Rather than a large number of lines each carrying only a small amount of data, his conception was for the data to be broken up into small chunks, later named ′packets′, with computers to switch them between physical circuits. These ideas of 'packet switching' were first presented in public in the US at the ACM symposium, in Gatlinburg, 1967, and in the UK at the IFIP Congress, 1968, in Edinburgh. They were adopted by the US Department of Defense and incorporated into ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. ARPANET's first link was established between the University of California and Stanford Research Institute in November 1969, by which time the NPL's packet switched network was already operational.

See Also

The Centre for Computing History, Cambridge

The Museum of Computing, Swindon

Retro Computer Museum, Leicester

A museum at the IBM site in Hursely, Winchester

Science Museum, London

Science and Industry Museum, Manchester

Jim Austin Computer Collection


The museum has its own cafe and gift shop.

  1. ^ Welchman, Gordon (1984) [1982], The Hut Six story: Breaking the Enigma codes, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-00-5305-0
  2. ^ "The Turing Bombe: The History of the Rebuild Project". 2024. Retrieved 13 September 2024.
  3. ^ Harper, John (2020). "The Turing Welchman Bombe Rebuild Project". Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  4. ^ Copeland, B. Jack, ed. (2006), Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–6, ISBN 978-0-19-284055-4
  5. ^ "Military Comms: WWII Military Receiver RCA AR88". The Museum of Technology, The Great War and WWII. 2007. Retrieved 13 September 2024.
  6. ^ Sale, Tony (2004) [1998], The Colossus Computer 1943–1996 and how it helped to break the German Lorenz cipher in WWII, Cleobury Mortimer: M & M Baldwin, ISBN 0-947712-36-4
  7. ^ Colossus – The Rebuild Story, The National Museum of Computing, archived from the original on 18 April 2015, retrieved 13 May 2017
  8. ^ "EDSAC - Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator". The National Museum of Computing. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  9. ^ Wilkes, W. V.; Renwick, W. (1950). "The EDSAC (Electronic delay storage automatic calculator)". Math. Comp. 4 (30): 61–65. doi:10.1090/s0025-5718-1950-0037589-7.
  10. ^ Goddard, Jonathan (3 May 2019). "70 years since the first computer designed for practical everyday use". University of Cambridge: Department of Computer Science and Technology. Retrieved 13 September 2024.
  11. ^ Howlett, John ‘Jack’ (1979). "Computing at Harwell: 25 years of Theoretical Physics at Harwell: 1954–1979". Retrieved 30 May 2009.
  12. ^ "Oldest working digital computer". Guiness World Records. 2012. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  13. ^ Ward, Michael ‘Mike’ (19 November 2012). "Technology Correspondent". News. UK: BBC. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
  14. ^ Murrell, Kevin (2016). Adapt and Survive: A Lesson from History in Positioning in the Computing Industry. The National Museum of Computing. ISBN 978-0956795649.
  15. ^ Bird, Raymond 'Dickie' (Summer 1999), "BTM's First Steps into Computing", Resurrection: The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society, 22, ISSN 0958-7403
  16. ^ Enticknap, Nicholas (Summer 1998), "Computing's Golden Jubilee", Resurrection (20), The Computer Conservation Society, ISSN 0958-7403, archived from the original on 9 January 2012, retrieved 19 April 2008
  17. ^ Lavington, Simon (1980), Early British Computers, Manchester University Press, p. 34, ISBN 0-7190-0803-4
  18. ^ Hartley-Smith, Alan. "TAC and PANIC". Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  19. ^ Welbourne, D. (1 January 1968). "Alarm analysis and display at Wylfa nuclear power station". Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  20. ^ Lavington, Simon (2011-05-19). Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947–67. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 662. ISBN 9781848829336.
  21. ^ Johnstone, Adrian (Spring 1991). "The Young person's Guide to... The Elliott 803B". Resurrection (Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society). 1 (3). ISSN 0958-7403. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  22. ^ "Elliott 903". Centre for Computing History. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  23. ^ Francis, C.G. (11 February 1965). "IBM introduces powerful small computer". Director of Information (Press release). White Plains, New York: International Business Machines (IBM). Archived from the original on 2019-07-05.
  24. ^ Utley, Brian (Jan 2005). "Guest speaker: Brian Utley" (MP3) (Interview). Retrieved 2012-01-02.
  25. ^ Francis, C. G. (11 February 1965). "IBM Introduces Powerful Small Computer with Monthly Rental Beginning at $695". Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  26. ^ "IBM 1130 Computing System". technikum29. Retrieved 10 September 2024.
  27. ^ Buckle, J. K. (1978). The ICL 2900 Series. Macmillan computer science series. Macmillan. ISBN 9780333219171.
  28. ^ "ICL 2966". Retrieved 10 September 2024.
  29. ^ "Software". TNMOC. Retrieved 11 September 2024.
  30. ^ "PC Gallery". TNMOC. Retrieved 11 September 2024.
  31. ^ "Dexodus". Retrieved 12 September 2024.
  32. ^ "BBC Computer Literacy Project 1980-1989". BBC Rewind. Retrieved 12 September 2024.
  33. ^ "Technology of the Internet". The National Museum of Computing. Retrieved 2020-01-31.
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