Student Visit to the Museum of Computing
Fri, 26 Feb 2016 10:44:00 GMT
Students, along with academics Hugh Osborne and Simon Parkinson, visited the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park on Wednesday 17th February 2016, to gain insight into the history of the Computer with a particular emphasis on British significant breakthroughs. During the day they learnt from subject experts about the pioneering work during WW2 at Bletchley Park to decrypt the Lorenz Cipher generated, amongst other things, by the German Enigma machine. They saw a rebuilt and working Tunny and Colossus machine to demonstrate the process of how the radio signals were intercepted right through to decryption.
During their visit they also received a demonstration of the world’s oldest computer, The Harwell Dekatron (1951), which was used during designing Britain’s first nuclear reactor. This was a particularly important exhibit, as the students are familiar with the base-10 architecture of the Dekatron from learning about The Post Room Computer, developed and taught by Dr Hugh Osborne on the Hardware and Networks first year module.
They then saw exhibits demonstrating the development of computing systems from the 1960 to the modern day. This included viewing exhibits demonstrating the enormous size of early commercial computing solutions, right through to the development of the modern multi-user personal computer.
The students also had a rare opportunity to practise their programming skills on some original 1980s BBC Microcomputer systems (right). These were developed by the BBC as part of their BBC Computer Literacy Project, and during the session students were able to program a basic snake game using the BBC BASIC educational programming language.
