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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 that can be visited in a broadly chronological sequence, starting with the working WW2 replicas.

Bombe Gallery

The Bombe gallery houses a fully working replica of a Bombe machine that was used to crack Enigma messages in WW2. It 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. 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. There is also a working replica Enigma cipher machine in this gallery plus various related artefacts.

Tunny and Colossus Galleries

A team led by Tony Sale reconstructed a Colossus Mark 2 computer at Bletchley Park. Here, in 2006, Sale supervises the breaking of an enciphered message with the completed machine.

Separate from the Enigma story is the less well-known one of the deciphering of messages produced by the more secure Lorenz SZ teleprinter cipher attachments, which is told in these two galleries. The Tunny galley exhibits an original Lorenz SZ42 machine, 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, the unseen machine and the British-built emulator. The gallery also exhibits a reproduction of part of the original Lorenz listening station from Knockholt in Kent, a 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. This machine with its 2,420 valves (vacuum tubes) and its programmability by switches and patch leads, is a reproduction of what is claimed to be the world’s first programmable electronic computer. Ten Colossus machines were built during WW2, specifically to help in the cracking of Lorenz-enciphered messages.

There are a number of other other artefacts in this gallery.

First Generation 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, 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. 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 widely accepted as 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.

• Harwell Dekatron (aka the WITCH) from 1951. The world’s oldest original working computer. 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.

• Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC 1) from 1951. A relatively recent arrival, nearly as old as the WITCH, but not working.

HEC was based on an original design by Andrew Booth of Birkbeck College, London University. 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:

• A Williams–Kilburn tube the first random-access memory device that gave rise to the world's first stored program computer the Manchester Baby.

• Parts from both a Manchester Mark 1 computer and an Atlas supercomputer which was a world first with virtual memory and which, for a time was the world's most powerful computer.

Large Systems Gallery

This gallery contains many machines of the 1960s to 1980s and one or two from the 1990s. All are large machines and include:

• Marconi TAC from the late 1950s — a rare machine used to partly drive a nuclear power station. It ran live 24/7 1968 to 2004.
• ICL 2966 – true mainframe, rare sight today (1970s/1980s)
• Elliott 803 – one of the first UK all transistor machines (1960s)
• Elliott 903 – mid sixties
• IBM 1130 – a rare surviving IBM machine (most were leased and scrapped at end of lease period), home to the first patented changeable hard drive, mid sixties

See Also

The Centre for Computing History, Cambridge

The Museum of Computing, Swindon

Retro Computer Museum, Leicester

A museum at IBM site in Hursely, Winchester

Science Museum, London

Science and Industry Museum, Manchester

On display in the museum are many famous early computing era machines, including a functioning Colossus Mark 2 computer that was rebuilt between 1993 and 2008 by a team of volunteers led by Tony Sale. Colossus was a machine that helped break enemy encryption during World War II. Since 2018, the reconstruction of the Turing-Welchman Bombe, of the type used to help break Enigma, is also at the museum.

The museum also includes the world's oldest working digital computer (the Harwell Dekatron / WITCH), machines from the 1960s such as the Marconi Transistorised Automatic Computer (T.A.C.), Elliott 803 and 905, an ICL 2966 mainframe from the 1980s, an IBM 1130 from the 1960s, an analogue computer, a hands-on retrocomputing gallery, and several restoration projects such as the PDP-8 and the PDP-11-based air traffic control system from London Terminal Control Centre at West Drayton near London. Further exhibits include mechanical and electronic calculators, a history of slide rules, a pair of Cray supercomputers, and a personal computing gallery with ten hands-on machines. Visitors can also see a re-build of the Cambridge University EDSAC computer that is underway (still in progress as of May 2019).

There is also a suite which includes many BBC Micro personal computers which are used to encourage programming among visitors, a temporary exhibition space used for short-term exhibitions and a hands on display of video game consoles from different eras. All of this is alongside various other displays of devices and information regarding the evolution of computing from the 1960s to the modern era.

Since 2009, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has sponsored a gallery about technology of the Internet, featuring the pioneering work on packet switching carried out at NPL and the development of the first public data networks.

The museum has its own cafe and gift shop.