A grand day out
There. That told you.
I had a marvelous day out yesterday. We started out at the Milton Keynes Museum, for a look at their telephone collection. I was expecting a room with a few display cases in it, worthy of about half an hours pointing and nodding at examples of old phones.
What I got was a room full of phones, a selection of plug style switchboards (seen above), with a Strowger electromechanical telephone exchange in the middle. There’s nothing like the sound a Strowger makes as it connects a call. Beautiful.
Pretty much all the phones in the room were operational, and connected to one of the several exchanges on show. You could dial any phone from any other phone, routing the call via the appropriate switchboard. It was “hands on” but without a contrived button push or multimedia presentation in sight!
The exhibition is manned by a group of volunteers, most of whom are retired GPO/BT engineers. They’re full of enthusiasm for the telecoms industry, and more than happy to spread that enthusiasm around as they run up and down stepladders, soldering irons in hand, tinkering with the exchange in the middle of the room.
A museum which smells of solder is a special museum indeed.
Over 2 hours of telephones later, we wandered over to the museum cafe for lunch (toasties, tea and cake) which was an entertainment in itself. When we went up for cake, we were greeted with “I’m having my lunch love, don’t worry, I’ll get one of the regulars to serve you”
Lunch done, it was on to Bletchley Park for a visit to the National Museum of Computing, which includes the Colossus Rebuild Project:
They’ve put a lot of money into it since I was last there about 2 years ago, and it shows! There’s a lot more on display than ever before. Pictured above is the Colossus Rebuild, which has been joined by a second room…
Which contains the “Heath Robinson” (The framework in the middle distance) which was the forerunner to Colossus, and the “Tunny Machine” which is in the background. Colossus broke the wheel settings for the german Lorenz Machine (A bit like an Enigma Machine, but with more rotors, as used by Hitler and his generals) – these settings were then fed into the Tunny Machine which decoded the message.
The main bulk of the National Computer Museum stuff is in the next building. They’ve got rooms dedicated to home computers, large mainframes, and various other systems – most of which are working and demonstrated – I don’t have many photos from there, apart from this shot of a tabulating machine:
That’s the 4th time I’ve been to Bletchley Park since I first went in about 1996, and each time I go it gets better! There’s always enough new stuff on display to distract me, and I still haven’t managed to see their cinema/film/camera collection.
Given that they’ve started restoring a computer built from decatrons, I don’t think I’m going to make it into the cinema on my next visit either! Especially if I stop off to play with the telephones first…
Edit: A few more photos in this album…
I’d love to see Bletchley Park!
Nice. So there is something in Milton Keynes worth seeing then?!