Vintage Computers Are Cool! II
Photos from my recent trip to Bletchley Park’s National Museum of Computing.
On my birthday I drove three hours from Manchester to Bletchley Park’s National Museum of Computing. I’ve found I prefer the aesthetic of the computers of yore, with masses of cables, switches, dials, and various other electronic components on display, so it was great to see, among others, the Bombe, Tunny and Colossus—some of the first computers ever built which are the epitome of such an image.
Also on display and not pictured but worth mentioning is a decommissioned mercury delay line, something that has bewildered me ever since I learnt about it in the middle of last year. A mercury delay line is a tube filled with mercury that stores binary data as pulses of acoustic energy and was the primary form of data storage for the University of Cambridge’s Mathematical Laboratory’s Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) in 1949. I find it marvellous that such a thing was invented.
Anyhow, below are my favourite photos from my visit:
