Trust appoints fund raising consultancy

In order to achieve our ambitious fund raising plans, the trustees have appointed a small consultancy company with a proven track record in capital fund raising. Our advisiors, Naomi Russell and Katy Richards, are working with the trustees and volunteers, to ensure a successful outcome to the project.

Museum recieves its first visitors

As a trial of our procedures we opened the museum to visitors on Saturday and Monday over the Easter weekend. Almost 800 people came to look around the displays so far. We are very pleased to have had the opportunity to show the musuem to these early visitors and it has given us a chance to review some of the display material and the guides. Needless to say it has also given us a big list of snagging points we need to deal with!

Museum supplies working systems for the BBC Anniversary event

The National Museum of Computing supplied the working BBC computers, including a Domesday machine, for the Computer Conservation Society event at the Science Museum. The BBC have a video clip of interviews here. Click here for the CCS web pages.

Museum featured on Silicon.com

Silicon.Com are producing a series of reports about the museum, and the firstl video is available now. Click here to view the video.

Home for museum guaranteed for 25 years

We are pleased to annouce the signing of the lease over H Block with The Bletchley Park Trust. We can now work together to create a world class museum dedicated to computing in all its forms. More soon.

Cipher Challenge Winner Award Prize at Bletchley Park

Joachim Schueth, from Bonn, won the National Museum of Computing's Cipher Challenge on November 15 last year. Today (Saturday, Jan 26) he received his winner’s prize which included a valve from the working Colossus at the Museum, in Block H at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the war-time home of Colossus. Using his laptop, Mr Schueth unravelled a code transmitted from the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany, from a Lorenz SZ42 Cipher machine, used by the German High Command to relay secret messages during the war.

Joachim Schueth, speaking in front of Colossus at Bletchley Park, said: “It was unfair because I was using a modern PC, while Colossus was created more than 60 years ago. It really is astonishing and humbling that the world’s first programmable, digital computer was created in the 1940s. Without those Bletchley Park pioneers, I would be out of a job.”

New Patrons & A Curatorial Advisor

The trustees are delighted to announce that the museum has two new patrons: Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir Crispin Tickell.
We can also announce that Doron Swade has agreed to become an advisor to the museum. Doron was previously Senior Curator of Computing at the Science Museum, London and is currently guest curator at the Computer History Museum in California.
We will add more information shortly.

The Guardian

Jack Copeland has written a super piece about us in the IT supplement this week. This is a link to the online article.

The Media!

We have been inundated by the media - a fantastic, if tiring, feeling! We have been interviewed and appeared on BBC 1, ITN Anglia, the Today Programme, BBC Scotland, The World Service, and many local radio stations. Articles about the new museum have appeared in The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Express!

The Cipher Challange

The cipher challenge started today in ernest with regular transmissions being received from the HNF museum in Paderborn, Germany.

Daily Express Article

Following a visit from the Express features editor, the Saturday paper on 20th October included a two page article on the Colossus and the museum.

ICL 2966 Mainframe moved onto display gallery

It has taken far longer than we planned, but the ICL 2966 Mainframe is now on display in our Large Systems Room. This is a major milestone, as the machine has been in storage for years, but we have always hoped to get the system displayed. Work now begins on restoring the system, and at least part of that project we hope will form part of a computer engineering student's final year project! Click here for more pictures

International Cipher Challenge

We have today uploaded the first pages of information about a unique internal cipher challenge. Click here for more details

Moving the ICL 2966 Mainframe

Work on the new gallery is almost complete, and we are now planning the move of this iconic system from the 1980s. For the record, we are moving four processor cabinets, two consoles, four tape drives, one line-printer, nineteen disk drives, and two card readers. Add to that more cable and spares than you can imagine and the odd hundred-weight of manuals and drawings. (When we say disk drives, by the way, think more of a top-loading washing machine than a paper back!)

British Computer Society celebrates at the National Museum of Computing

The BCS @ 50 event to celebrate the first fifty years of the British Computer Society was held in July and gave delegates the first opportunity to see the work on the new museum

BBC News OnLine Visits the Museum

Mark Ward from the BBC OnLine website visited the museum today, and is planning to write up our progress on the BBC web site.

Follow this link to the BBC Technology page about us
This is a link to the BBC's follow up page about us

National Museum of Computing name registered.

War-time cipher machine Colossus will be the star exhibit at a new National Museum of Computing being set up with BCS's support this year at Bletchley Park.

BCS is making a £75,000 donation to help keep Colossus operational in its original location at Bletchley where it cracked Nazi codes during the Second World War Colossus will form an important focus of the new museum, which is being developed throughout 2007 by the Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust (CCHT) in partnership with Bletchley Park Trust (BPT).
The museum will show how the painstaking work of the Bletchley Park code breakers in cracking first the Enigma and then the Lorenz machine gave rise to the age of digital computing 'Colossus is a genuine milestone in computing history - not just in terms of the crucially important role it played in winning the Second World War, but also in terms of the way it paved the way for the future of computing,' said Professor Nigel Shadbolt, BCS President.
'BCS is therefore delighted and honoured to support the re-installation of Colossus in its original position at Bletchley and, through the BCS Computer Conservation Society, to have helped in rebuilding a fully operational Colossus.'

The working rebuild is of one of the Colossus machines that cracked the German Army High Command's Lorenz cipher. Its re-installation is the culmination of 13 years of painstaking work by members of the Colossus Rebuild Project led by Anthony E Sale, a director of CCHT.
The Colossus computers were shrouded in the highest levels of secrecy for 30 years after the war, and Sale and his team of volunteers had to start with meagre information derived from eight wartime photographs plus fragments of circuit diagrams to rebuild the original.

After 6,000 volunteered man days of diligent work Colossus now sits in the original location of Colossus No. 9 in Block H at Bletchley Park. The public can see demonstrations of how Colossus cracked a real intercepted Lorenz message.

The museum will complement Bletchley Park Trust's story of code breaking up to the Colossus and allow visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of that time, through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s.

Other planned exhibits in the National Museum of Computing include:

• working Air Traffic Control station previously installed at West Drayton;
• the bringing back to life of an ICL 2900 - one of the workhorse mainframe.

The BCS Computer Conservation Society has also played a major role in restoring the Bombe at Bletchley

World’s first purpose built computer centre planned to become home of National Computer Museum at Bletchley Park.

Built in 1944, Block H at Bletchley Park was designed to house the world’s first digital computers, the Colossus machines.   Built to break Hitler’s advanced Lorentz cipher, the Colossus laid the foundations for all modern computers.

Planned for early 2007, a joint venture between Bletchley Park Trust (BPT) and CodesAndCiphers Heritage Trust (CCHT), hopes to establish a National Computer Museum in this Grade II listed building.

The museum will allow visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra secret pioneering efforts of the Colossus, through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s.

Using original systems restored to working order with the help of the BCS’s Computer Conservation Society, the museum will encourage visitors to operate and learn from our exhibits, and enjoy using machines they once used, programmed, or simply played with.

Andy Clark from CCHT said: “It is wonderful to have secured Block H as the location for the Computer Museum. We are delighted to be working with the BPT with the joint aim of improving on what is already one of the world's most important heritage sites.”

Sir Christopher Chataway, Chairman of BPT is equally excited at the prospect of working with the CCHT: ”We are keen to ensure that Bletchley Park vividly explains both the astonishing wartime contribution of the code breakers and the unique role it has played in the history of information technology. With that in mind, we are pleased to be able to offer Block H to the CCHT as the home of the National Computer Museum.”

Joint press release with Bletchley Park Trust

"Bletchley Park Trust (BPT) and Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust (CCHT) are working together to try to agree a common vision for a world class exhibition on the history of computing at Bletchley Park. Both parties are hoping that this might be opened in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society.

The CCHT has been working on plans to create a museum to honour the place in history of the Colossus computer and to show the development of computing from that machine to the present day. A team under the leadership of Tony Sale has spent more than 10 years carefully rebuilding a Colossus Mk 2.

BPT has recently received a generous offer of assistance from the American philanthropist Sydney Frank with a view to honouring Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker, whose mathematical work in the 1930's provided the foundations for the information age. A team of volunteers under John Harper is near completing the rebuild at Bletchley Park of the Turing-Welchman Bombe machine which was all important in the Park's deciphering successes.

Sir Christopher Chataway, Chairman of BPT said "We are keen to ensure that Bletchley Park vividly explains both the astonishing wartime contribution of the codebreakers and the unique role it has played in the history of information technology. In this endeavour I am very pleased at the prospect of working alongside the CCHT"

Andrew Clark, Director and Trustee of CCHT said, "We are keen to show how the design principles of the wartime Colossus spurred today's digital computing revolution. I am delighted that we can work with the BPT further to improve what is one of the world's most important heritage sites"