Today we made a little side trip. The temporary electrical switch we had installed in Turkey when the fan switch in Gertie failed, itself has failed. We tried to get ourselves into an auto electrician to replace it, but the only place we could find was so backed up with work, they couldn't help us. They couldn't even provide us with a replacement switch. But as we happened by a Halford's store, we dropped in, and Warren was able to get a switch, some spade connectors, and a pair of pliers to crimp the spade connectors onto the wires — we were now set up to do the job tonight. We really needed the van's heater system to keep us warm, as the temperatures round here are dropping to zero and below overnight!
Anyway, with electrics under control, we continued on to Bletchley Park. This time, however, our destination was The National Museum of Computing (TNMoC). We had visited part of it the other day — the Tunney machines, Heath Robinson and Colossus. The rest of the museum is really a nostalgic wander through the history of computing, from the modest abacus and slide rules up to modern flight simulators and air traffic control simulators.
During our journey, we got involved in a pretty technical conversation with one of the engineers there — his pride and joy were the analogue computers he had had a hand in rebuilding, and in one case, inventing.
They have a whole room of old hard disk drives, many being the size of a washing machine and having a capacity of as little as 3.75 megabytes (the IBM 350 Disk Drive).
Another computer in the Museum is the WITCH, or Harwell Dekatron, computer. This is the oldest original computer still in operation — although today, unfortunately, if had misbehaved and had had to be shut down, so we didn't see it in operation. Fortunately, we had already seen it working last year when we were here.
A lot of the museum deals with education and the computers that were available in the UK — BBC Micro, Sinclair, Amstrad, Acorn. There is a whole room of punched-card sorting machines — and in the museum you can come face to face with Tony Sale's robot George, which in the Radio Times list of 'Wallace & Gromit's Top Ten Cracking Inventions' came in as No.1 (just a bit of fun). The museum is pushing student activities, and currently about 4,000 school students come through each year - they are hoping to increase this. Currently they are pushing the idea of women in computing, trying to encourage the girls to consider this as a career.
We were able to revisit out first computers — the IBM PC that Warren had at work, and the Atari 800 (and its little brother, the Atari 400) that we had at home.
This was another nerdy kind of day, but in a much more relaxed fashion than the last few.
After a pleasant day at TNMoC, we again adjourned to out layby at Shucklow Hill for the night, and Warren set about replacing the faulty switch (Suzie was very important, as she was holding the torch). Switch replaced, we had a nice cosy night!
Distance driven — today, 24 miles ( 38 km ); to date, 30,884 miles ( 49,703 km )
Takes you back. We had a machine we bought through Burra School for our three when they were first available up there, back in the 70 or 80's I think. The first little one you got looks very similar. Glad the heating is on board. Would hate to read of two frozen Aussies found in Deep frozen van. Love ya, Cathy
ReplyDeleteYeah the Atari! Fun childhood memories for me, will show this to Jonno. Our first home pc was a black and white apple.
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