Vintage PC Gallery opens at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park
The key personal computers that have led the digital revolution in
Britain are on display in a new interactive gallery at The National
Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park.
The new PC Gallery, officially opened on 7 May 2009, exhibits 50
personal computers (PCs), many of them on interactive display. They
date from the 1960s to the present telling the stories of the
development of hardware and software, and the ongoing miniaturisation
from luggables to handhelds.
The earliest model on display, dating from 1965, is a PDP8 from the
USA, the first mass-produced computer. The exhibition then focuses on
the heyday of British computing and includes working models of the BBC
B micro, the Dragon 32, the Sinclair ZX80, the Amstrad PC1512. With
the rise and rivalry of the IBM PC and the Apple Macs throughout the
1980s, the story then moves on to operating systems and software.The
1990s see the rise of the luggable becoming portable and then the
handheld.
"The PC Gallery is an excellent demonstration of how The National
Museum of Computing can develop given sufficient funds," explained
Kevin Murrell, a director and trustee of TNMOC. "We used to display
some of this equipment in a classroom-type environment and it was one
of the most popular elements of the museum. Now these machines are
displayed in an interactive gallery surrounded by reminders of the
world events and social context of their time. It really brings home
how far and how quickly computing has moved on and that we still are
in the midst of an astonishing revolution, the pace of which is almost
beyond comprehension.
"We have been keen to celebrate the British contribution to computing.
In America, the development of personal computing is often seen as a
battle between IBM and Apple, but in Britain the story was quite
different with many small entrepreneurial companies breaking new
ground in the late 1970s and early 1980s."
Curating the PC Gallery has taken several years and painstaking
research. One of the most difficult devices to find was a working
Sinclair ZX80 in good condition. A device that the Museum is still
searching for is a Sinclair MK14, the first home computing kit that
went on sale in 1977 for £40. TNMOC would like to hear from anyone who
can help.
The development of the PC Gallery has been made possible by support in
recent months from PGP Corporation, IBM and Hewlett Packard. Two other
major galleries are being planned for later this year and ideas about
a gallery on supercomputing are being formulated.
About The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park
The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, an independent
charity, houses the largest collection of functional historic
computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first
electronic programmable computer.
The Museum complements the Bletchley Park Trust’s story of
codebreaking up to the Colossus and allows visitors to follow the
development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of
the 1940s through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise
of personal computing in the 1980s. New working exhibits are regularly
unveiled and the public can already view a rebuilt and fully
operational Colossus, a working ICL 2900, one of the workhorse
mainframes computers of the 1980s, and many of the earliest desktops
of the 1980s and 1990s.
The Museum is currently open on Thursdays and Saturdays from 1pm, and
on bank Holidays in spring and summer. Groups may visit at other times
by arrangement.
For more information, see:
www.tnmoc.org