A grand day out at the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park and the Milton Keynes Museum, MK

 

Where do geeks go when they have a rare weekend off and fancy a day out? Why they go to places like the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, a rather understated collection of buildings on the old Bletchley Park site, just a stones-throw away from where all the amazing codebreaking work of the 2nd World War went on. 

Though most folk gravitate to the aforementioned 'proper' exhibition, Site H hosts the TNMOC (as it's more widely known) and has replicas of the Colossus codebreaking behemoth, as well as several other large scale first generation computers either directly linked to the super-secret codebreaking stuff, or later large scale computers developed for educational or commercial purposes. 

Good museums are only as good as the exhibits and the staff there, and in the case of TNMOC both were excellent, with super-engaging staff who talked at length about Colossus and the later Witch Generation 1 computer, the first of its kind to feature most of the modern 'bits' of computers we now take for granted like input and output methods, as well as storage and memory. 

Further through the exhibition spaces, we found lots of stuff dear to this old geek's heart...

Lots of microcomputers were there, including a special section all about Sir Clive Sinclair and the ZX80, ZX81 and mighty 'Speccy' - the ZX Spectrum, which definitely caught my daughter's eye as she's grown up hearing her old man banging on about "Manic Miner" (which she's seen playing here) as well as other Speccy classics. 

I was wearing my Manic Miner scarf on a very cold day, so it was great to find a hands-on working example of the Speccy (admittedly the ZX Spectrum Plus rather than the old (and probably quite fragile) rubber keyed version I remember spending far too much time playing with as a kid. 

Further through the exhibition, we found rack after rack of kit, some labelled, some not - but most still looking in brilliant condition despite being close to 40 years old in a couple of cases. 

The cream of 80s computing gathered together for all to see!

The worst part was thinking how many of these machines I'd owned at one point and either sold on or got rid of. ZX 81? Check. ZX Spectrum? Check. BBC Micro? No was never 'posh' enough to afford one of those but we used to spend a lot of time playing Elite on the school ones. 

It almost felt like the museum could do with a dedicated game geek (hint hint) to curate and set things out in a bit more of an orderly fashion but for me it was just incredible to see even relatively obscure 'brit computing' stuff like the Oric 1, Oric Atmos and Dragon 32 all still there and present - as well as awesome games machines like the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC464. 

With the units that were set up, I'd forgotten just how difficult it was to play games with a 'proper' joystick. As well as the machines themselves, there were all manner of awesome controllers on show and quite often attached up, like the Kempston Joystick, the Competition Pro which was my go-to 'stick' back in the day. 

As we continued through the galleries, we found old arcade machines (Hard Drivin' by Atari - I'd forgotten just how unforgiving that game was) rubbing shoulders with classic pinball tables (The Simpsons, YAY!) and later on a ton of mobile phones on show and being proudly displayed in all their weird shapes and forms (remember the Nokia N-Gage? Or the original Motorola "Brick" phone?)

We would've spent a lot longer there, but I think I was beginning to suffer from nostalgia overload, so we made our way to the Milton Keynes Museum, just a little further into the wilds of Buckinghamshire. 

This was a very different experience, and not a place we'd either heard of or had any burning desire to visit. Yet we ended up really enjoying ourselves here, reading up on and seeing a ton of artefacts drawn from the area's history, as well as lots of objects that were originally part of the Victorian farm that the museum sits in the grounds of.  Again, the museum staff were utterly brilliant and really keen to show off all the goodies therein. 

The Farmhouse itself is preserved as a brilliant example of Victorian life, both 'upstairs' and 'downstairs' with lots of exhibits describing what it would have been like as a servant working at the house, or as one of the landed gentry who enjoyed a rather nicer time in the comfortable lounge and entertainment room. 

The museum has so much to see that we were rapidly running out of time. One section houses transport and lots of bikes and trams, train carriages and buses (as well as a couple of Sinclair C5s lurking at the back of one display). 

There are also rooms dedicated to children's toys, and a fantastic telecommunications section filled to the brim with just about everything you can think of to do with phones, from clanky old dial phones to sleek modern mobiles. Most of the phone exhibits were 'wired' so you could actually use them. My daughter really loved the novelty phones in particular, though I'm not sure we'd want to give house room to a Chameleon-shaped phone that had Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" as a ring tone. 

Sadly we got to the end of the day far too quickly but vowed to return to both places. What an awesome day out!