It was great, there were so many computers. I was shown around by Kevin Murrell of The Computer Conservation Society and introduced me to Tony sale who rebuilt the Colossus. The shear scale of the museum and vast quantity the machines was slightly overwhelming, I had thought my collection of around sixty computers was impressive.

The machine I fell in love with was the Elliot 803, from what I understand so far, instead of having a screen to see if the machine is running the code correctly it has a speaker, different tones are generated by different opcodes in the accumulator I think, this of coursewas of immediate interest to me. The programmer would hear the code. The other thing to note is the Elliot 803 took up a very large area, you had to walk inside of it to operate it, it was only 4K and the RAM Module was about the same size of a CRT monitor. One of the other things that fascinated me was you could actually see each memory address, whereas before you would have to imagine a little space, you could actually see it on the Elliot and you could see if it was going wrong. The Elliot 803 also featured the button missing from modern computers, the “OBEY” button.

There was also a room, which could be in terms of my a affection for old computers be refferred to as heaven, featuring several of the computers I grew up with in the 80’s and 90’s, Commodore 64’s, ZX and BBC Micros, which was made even more impressive by the fact you could actually play on them.

There were other computers like the PDP8 and the Marconi Computer 1 which was responsible for running nuclear power plants, to many to recall in all, but I am sure I will write about in more detail as I research them further.

To see the full gallery of my photos visit my flickr page.