An American Visits British Computer Museums 

A few notes from the desk: 1. Thanks for all the kind comments and suggestions about places to go. If I do return, Bletchley Park is high on my list. I didn't make it on this trip because I had a week's worth of time to spend and I wanted to see other local attractions too. 2. The use of the Union in the opening bit was part of an attempt to poke fun at what Americans see as stereotypes of Englishness and Britishness. They say if you have to explain a joke that it isn't funny, and that's fair. I thought in combination with the tea, biscuits, and then undercutting it with computers that it would have been obvious, but in retrospect I should have been more over-the-top in making the joke. I'm well aware of the political and geographic subdivisions of the UK, the British isles, the constituent countries, et cetera. I intentionally used the Union instead of the St. George cross because the bit didn't quite hit without it and when I consulted with some UK friends ahead of time they thought the Union was fine. Clearly it didn't land for everybody though. Please accept it for the intended joke at my expense that it is. 3. Some helpful commenters have pointed out that "Dome" in "Domesday" actually rhymes with Doom! I had done a bunch of reading on the project but didn't actually hear anyone pronounce it. It's been duly noted and I've added it to my vocabulary.

Other UK essentials are mational Museum of computing at Bletchly Park, London Science Museum, and This Museum is Not Obsolete, next door to the Micro museum in Ramsgate

5:25 thats my mum and dads digital computer, we donated it to the museum when Dad died, it was fully complete, with floppy discs, manuals and a printer,

It was a real pleasure meeting you and thank you again for your generosity. This is a great guide for the many wonderful museums in the UK, brilliant video 👍

In Kenya in the 1980s, students learned microelectronics on a network of Sinclair Spectrums. They became the people who repaired computers in the country. Previously you had to send computers to Saudi Arabia for repair. As there was 160% duty and sales tax on computers at the time (President Danial Arap Moi said the purpose of computers was to put secretaries out of work), the Sinclair QL became the most common business computer as you could smuggle it in. I wrote and ran a multi-tasking program on a QL to do the timekeeping for the Nairobi Round Table 24 hour pedal kart race.

😂"Where Danger Mouse called Bilbo Baggins colourful names!" Brilliant!

The BBC Micro was my introduction to computers when I was 12 years old. I'm autistic and programming was one thing that made absolute sense to me. I've been programming/software engineering since I was 12. I have no idea where I would be without that machine, but I suspect I wouldn't have had the life I've enjoyed ever since.

They still run the first electronic computer, the Colossus, at Bletchley. Runs at 300K instructions per second! The science museum also has a great collection of some of the first mechanical computers.

About 12 years ago we had a young intern working through the summer at the civil engineering company I worked for and I was telling her about the strides that had been made in office technology since I had started work in 1968 (I'm 72 now). The calculator we had in our room back them was a hand cranked FACIT machine but computers such as the Olivetti 101 were creeping in. Then came electronic pocket calculators and I told her of one, the Sinclair, that you could build yourself from a kit. "Oh yes" she said, "My Grandfather use to make those." "Was he a keen hobbyist then?" "No. he owned the factory where they were made." Pause "Your Grandfather's Sir Clive Sinclair isn't he?" "Mmmm" Charming young person, went on to study Civil Engineering at Cardiff.

Nothing makes you feel old like seeing all your childhood computer kit in a museum.

Nice you visited the Cave, Neil has put a huge amount of work into it and deserves all the support he gets.

It's a pleasure to see an American video about the US that doesn't involve differences in language or culture. Also, your style and manner were interesting and the travel advice really useful for foreign visitors. Hats off to you, sir!

There was a BBC tv show for kids called Blue Peter that ran a project where they appealed for accounts of daily life in Britain from viewers with a view to collating them and storing them on a 12” laser disc using a BBC B micro. Sort of a modern day Domesday Book to preserve a snapshot of history for posterity. A few years ago they had to have another appeal for anyone who had the hardware or a workaround for reading it as the hardware they had didn’t work and the file formats were obsolete.

Thanks for sharing this adventure; good the see some US appreciation for the groundworks of UK computing. And also impressed with your grasp of UK phraseology.

I made a similar pigrimage to the cave from Canada in 2022. I took a taxi from in front of Coffee #1/Lloyd's Bank in Stroud but then walked back after the day was done. It was a good walk and a great way to come down off of the excitement of meeting Neil, his team, and all the rest of the retro folk there. Will be back, for sure!

so glad you enjoyed your trip. I would recommend the Bletchley Park Site where the code breakers were based during ww2. They have a working colossus machine amongst other things of what was really the first computer. Enjoyed the video.

You forgot the most important bit of riding the bus, saying thank you to the driver as you hop off.

Quality of video and narrative is impressive 👍👍

I didn't know we had some many computer museums here in the UK! A real eye-opener. Nice commentary and presentation style. You've a new subscriber.

Great video. I recently travelled to London (I'm from Canada) and only had time to visit the museum in Bletchley. These other museums are definitely on my list the next time I go back. I only have the Computer History Museum in California to compare it to. The UK museums seem to have a nicer feeling to them - almost like you're visiting your friend's house who collects a lot of stuff.

5:15 The Elliott 903 was the first computer I used when I began my degrees in Physics and Computational Science at Leeds University in 1971. We began programming with Algol 60, punching paper tape on a Teletype ASR33, fed in through the paper tape reader shown slightly to the left of centre of the top, beside the paper tape dispenser cage (the blue thing). The inevitable error messages would be spewed, in full gaze of colleagues, onto the teletype console. I soon learned that, using the switches on top of the cabinet, I was able to redirect the errors to paper tape on a punch unit, to be taken and printed on a teletype in private, free from embarrassment.

Glad you mentioned the often overlooked Dragon 32. I still have mine, in working condition.

Throughly enjoyed that... rarely would a 25 min video catch my complete attention for it's entireity. Nice work

Seeing the dragon 32, the Amiga, BBC micros and 3D lander on the archimedes is a real stroll through memory lane.

I have no idea how I didn't know these places were in Stroud. I live 10 minutes away, and even went to school there! Ha! Will definitely be visiting soon

I live 8 miles from Cambridge and love the Centre for Computing History. the best part being that most computers there are running and you can just sit and use them.

Missed a trick with the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park. Colossus is there (restored and running), which helped the allies win WW2 by cracking the enigma code.

Sounds like you had an awesome time! God, that 80s School room took me back - I would have contributed to the Domesday project, programmed on the one BBC Micro in my Primary school, and can remember using RM Nimbuses at Secondary school!

I've been to the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge and agree that it's fantastic, particularly for an old geek like me who grew up with the ZX81 and Spectrum at home and RM Machines computers at school. Cambridge itself is a beautiful city and is well worth a wander round. I've been toying with the idea of a trip to the Retro Computing Museum for a while and I think you've persuaded me!

Man, you saw some amazing museums, and you missed some amazing museums. I can't even explain what they have here, even in small towns. It is just perfect. I even got an museum owner gifting me 8" Floppy disks after hours playing and using computers I knew and didn't knew about. All of the museum I saw where a pure display of love by its curators and they would let you use them and showcased them. I barely saw a computer just in display. I even saw how they real time deciphered enigma codes coming by radio from Germany in Bletchley park!

I was lucky enough to be in school during the late 80's. I had a Vic20 at home but studied computer science so got to use BBC B, master 128, Archimedes, a couple of apple machines as well as a few sinclair and amstrad machines at school. The pride and joy for our teacher was the Nimbus network. During school breaks he used to charge a small fee for pupils to play games on the machines including a MUD game which I helped maintain (I used to be pretty good at machine level coding and expnaded the MUD somewhat and used to be the moderator for it). To add on how progressive our teacher was he had The Hackers Handbook amongst the teaching materials lol. At home I graduated to an Amiga 500 for the last couple of years in school even modified it with real time clocks and memory etc. (I do not miss having to solder parts like in the old days). At the time not all schools had computing as an option since there was a lack of good teachers, especially in the scottish highlands, hence why I say I was fortunate. My "high" point was in the year after I'd actually passed my Higher exam in Computing but stayed an extra year to improve a couple of other subjects I'd already passed. Since I had more free time than most students I used to help the computing teacher a fair bit keeping machines running. The day of this new Higher class's prelim (an exam held a few months before the official final exam which allows the teacher to assess whether you should sit the final), just after the exam started I discussed the questions the teacher had set that day with him. Being shocked I knew what the questions were I showed him how I'd got a keylogger type program running in the background on his machine injected from another machine on the network sending me what he had on his machine live to mine and had basically printed out the exam after reconstructing the data into a document file while he was printing his exam papers that morning. We then went through how he could stop this happening in future since he trusted I hadn't passed the exam on to anyone (which I hadn't). He did quite rightly give me a bit of a roasting but no official action came about luckily. This was before any data protection law was on the books and I avoided getting myself into real trouble, the teacher could see I wasn't malicious, just creatively michevous since a couple of classmates and myself had pulled other stunts/pranks in the past. When I left school and was handing materials back in he told me he was both happy and sad to see me go lol. I went on to university to play around on Unix machines/networks but wasn't nearly as much of a nuisance. I still tinker but didn't go into a computing career, just an amateur these days and didn't keep up my coding so now the majority is forgotten but I still maintain/repair/build machines for friends/family.

I went to the Cambridge museum a few years ago. Absolutely loved it.

Spot on with the colloquialisms!

OMG. In secondary school in Melbourne Australia in the 1980s we had BBC Accorn’s in Computer Science classes. I had a Tandy TRS-80 at home to do my basic programming for Computer Science homework, and a Commodore Amiga 500 (?) after I got my first job.

A very enjoyable video and great presentation, thanks for taking the time

I love that you posed at the Cave with Day of the Tentacle behind you! I would blow Saturday afternoons on my roommate's computer playing either that or Quarantine. This was junior year of college, so 1994-95. I should've known then that my earning time on a computer science major's machine by doing maintenance for him would be my future in system administration and software support.

Excellent video. I'm glad you enjoyed your visit. Apologies for our weather.

Great review! Thanks for posting

Oh my. The BBC Micro and Nimbus classroom brought back memories.

Thanks for the awesome and informative video! I love it!❤

There is also another computer museum which is at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes which is also the home of the team that cracked the Enigma Machines, there is a fully working replica of Colossus the worlds 1st computer. there is also an area with more recent computer tech to see as well.

I’ve been leaving comments while watching and it’s been a blast. What an enjoyable video, thank you. For shame, I live in the UK and was in Cambridge a fortnight ago, but have never been to the museums you featured (though I have been to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester to see The Baby! My dad was American. Our first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Model I level 3 in 1979, when I was 7. I still recall the thrill of playing Worm and Star Trek on a green-on-black screen.

What an excellent travelogue & review! Can also add the EDSAC re-construction project in Cambridge.

Just an awesome video - thank you!

Back in the day,on my workbench I had BBC micro S/N 00002. We made interfaces and software for scools and colleges.. We also manufactured a 6502 board for machine code programming. Miss the simple 8 bit days

What a great video! Thanks for sharing your experiences here in BLADDY OL' INGLUND.

I miss my BBC computer, I also wish I'd bought the Archimedes. Went down the PC route, never so interfaceable. My original computer was a UK101.

Fantastic video, thanks for sharing. I'm in the UK, my first computer was the Sinclair ZX81 - you're video has got me crazy excited to visit these museums now... I think I could spend a week in them both!!! 🙂

Loved this video. Glad you had a great time.

Really great documentation and videography!

The cave is also the home of Herber who made the micro processors for some UK fruit machines along with other units.

I'm glad you enjoyed your visit. I've been to the museum in Cambridge a few times and attended a couple of 'pub quizzes' there, which are great fun. But yes, as long as you don't mind travelling, there's lots to see and do.

Pronounced DOOOOOOMsday project rather than Domesday :)

Another great video! Thanks!

At Bletchley Park there are two museum. The Bletchley Park one celebrates the code breakers in the Second World War, who broke German communications encrypted using the Enigma machine. But behind it is the National Computing Museum. It starts with the very first valve computer, built to break more advanced codes, goes through all the mainframe and mini computers used in the UK and ending up with micro computers.

Great video - thanks for sharing :)

Loved it. I had a BBC Micro and an Amiga. Wish I'd kept them. Luckily, I did keep music tech from the 80s. The DX7, Juno, 808, etc. Still useful today in my modern home studio. After a career as a software dev, these 'toys' help to make retirement bliss.

We have a huge national chain of vintage computer and fax machine museums, called the NHS.

Really nice video, thanks.

amstrad cpc 464 for me..great vid and hope you enjoyed your stay in the uk..

Nice to see the brilliant Technomatic twin disk drives for the Beebs. I bought one in the late 80s and it still works.

This was such a good video. I keep meaning to go to the one in Swindon, but both the ones you've featured look very good as well. And the Amiga was better than the ST.

What a great video, it looked like a fun itinerary. Also it's so nice to see people having a decent time in this country. I think there's a lot to like, but I am always worried visitors will see the awful side too and get really put off. I suppose it's the same for every country though 😂

Great video - and at 24m 14 right at middle bottom of the screen - there was a Yellow 'Phoebe' - Acorn's Phoebe/Risc Pc II prototype! Wonderful!

I'm glad you enjoyed your trip to out island Nation. The computer museum is place for great memories. It is really great to get hands-on.

Great viideo. I had a Sinclare Spectrum then a Sony MSX HitBit to which I added a 3.5" floppy drive and 4 colour plotter printer. Then at work I used a Newbrain, an ICL CPM PC and then a Panasonic IBM PC clone..... so many computers since then.

Definitely make a point of visiting the computer museum at Bletchley Park on your next trip. I had a great time when I visited there in 2019.

That's literal what we were schooled on. The we were going home playing on Spectrum +2's and commador 64's. We had Amegas and Atari St's before they were upgraded 😂.

Wow that brought back some great memories

Fond memories of grannys garden on the BC in the 80s.

What a fantastic video and brilliant commentary. Thank you so much for the Dragon 32 shout out - my very first home computer. I was at school in the 80’s here in the UK and did the very first “O-level” course offered on the syllabus. All completed on the BBC Micro model B in a set-up just as shown in your film. I remember my parents having to make a case for my acceptance on the course as it was over subscribed. Fortunately I’d spent my early teen years trying to get my Dragon to replicate KITT from Knight Rider rather than aiming to get the highest score on Cuthbert in the Jungle. Thanks once again.

Excellent video, which I hope will inspire others to do likewise, and I'm so glad that you obviously think the whole effort was worthwhile. And, as a Brit, I'm impressed and take pride that we've gone to such painstaking efforts to make such experience worthwhile.

Listened to this as an audio podcast earlier, and now I get to see pictures too!

The W.H. Smiths homage also looked similar to Woolworths (woolies). I believe you also had them in America.

My second computer was a BBC model B then a Spectrum +128 , many happy hours of early gaming on both .

when i was at school they had a dozen BBC Micro B's with an Archimedes as the server (the used to have Zaxxon running on it alot)

Thank you, I really enjoyed this. I also found out that this place exists and I grew up just north of Cambridge.🙂

I worked for Acorn Computers as Events Msnager. The same company that created the BBC Master for Schools also invented the ARM Chip in the 1980s; it enabled RISC Technology which actually made Microsoft seem like a dinosaur.

The QL Was taken on by ICL and made into there One Per Desk computer aimed at business, but as far as i know its only mass use was as the computer in every bingo hall in the country when the National Bingo Game was launched, it was used to print the call numbers and enter the winning ticket numbers

Thank you for such an interesting video - aah, those were the days. I've just moved up to Cambridgeshire, so that's definitely one for my 'must visit' list. Hope you enjoyed your stay in our country. 😎

was "take a jumbo across the water" a reference to the Supertramp song Breakfast In America ?

Got a ZX spectrum back in 1982 , my first computer with its massive 16k RAM. I also went to computer club at school, no computer lessons back then. At computer club we got to see the schools only computer, a BBC micro. We weren’t allowed to touch it though, just watch the teacher use it

Very interesting video thanks

I'm from Nottinghamshire in the UK and I grew up with the greatest machine of its era, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It would already support something like the doomsday project, but the BBC had to have a whole new computer for that. However, the custom graphics chip the BBC Master used was supplied by Texas Instruments

If I was visiting London for the first time, I'd probably spend two days sight seeing and the rest of the week drunk-as-a-skunk in one of the many pubs.

I'd love to go visit The Cave and Center for Computing History one day. Assuming I'll ever be able to visit outside of the US.

Sold a pretty rare Acorn Atom with colour board addon some time back, the computer I learnt to write assembler on, still have a BBC model B with 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and an unused box of discs in the attic....

19:38 We had Battleship Command, played it as a family. You had white and red pegs... Little trays for the pegs. Worked well!

Thank you for a great video.

I've just been to the RAF Museum London, in Hendon. But that's easy enough for me considering I live in the east of Greater London...

i played so much chuckie egg on a speccy 48k when i was a kid, learnt basic programing in school on a BBC micro and an atari ST before we finally got a windows pc around 1996 (think that was a cyrix pentrium 133+)

So easy from the USA. A trip to the UK from Sydney takes at least 22 hours each way. Very jealous! If I lived as close as you do, I'd be there monthly!

My very first computer was a BBC basic. 32K of RAM. learned to code in basic. Brings back memories. Never had the BBC master though.

Ahh the 48k spectrum.. it was said the pressing the keys felt like squashing a small sea creature. That was my first computer. My brother had a ZX81. It needed a school exercise book under the ram pack to make sure it didn’t fall out.

Great video. A shame you missed out on TNMOC at Bletchley Park.

That’s nothing like my experience in the U.K. of computing in the classroom. My school had 2 Research Machines 380Z’, a 480z and one BBC Micro model B. That was it for two computing classes of over 30 pupils each.

I live in Stroud and didn't know the cave existed

If you ever get a group of bbc computers and there is grannies garden. GO PLAY IT! It's something pretty much everyone played.

W H Smiths, was so much the look for me, it was the smell. All the high end magazines, made evey smiths smell so nice. I actually dont recall smiths selling computer stuff, magazines, stationary, calculators, and models, is all i recall. Tandys was for computer related things.

Good stuff ❤