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Old Computers Resurrected As Instruments At Bletchley Park

Posted by timothy on from the brunsviga-adding-machine-in-da-house dept.

arcticstoat writes with a snippet from bit-tech.com; musician Matthew Applegate "plans on assembling a virtual orchestra of 20 retired relics of computing at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The choice of venue will even allow Applegate to feature the infamous Colossus Mark 2 computer in the event, which was used for code-breaking in World War II and was recently reconstructed at Bletchley Park in 2007. ... A wide selection of computing fossils be used in Applegate's final musical presentation, which is called 'Obsolete?' This includes the Elliot 803 (a 1960s machine with 4KB of memory), the aforementioned Colossus Mark 2, a Bunsviga adding machine (pictured) and a punch card machine. As well as this, there are also some machines that will look nostalgically familiar to kids who grew up with the home computer generation, including a BBC Micro, an Atari 800XL, a Dragon 32 and an Amstrad CPC464." The article's list of the members of this "orchestra" makes an interesting checklist of computer hardware history.

4 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Infamous? by Brett+Buck · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why is the Colossus "infamous"? It's famous, and it's use saved thousands of lives and shortened the war.

            Brett

  2. a bit more useful by johnjones · · Score: 4, Informative

    bbc report with sound and video

    open in a tab then buy tickets !!!

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7895853.stm

    tickets links -

    March 20th, 2009 http://www.etickets.to/buy/?e=2285

    March 21th, 2009 http://www.etickets.to/buy/?e=2373

    regards

    John Jones
    http://www.johnjones.me.uk

  3. Re:NO! Not Colossus! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Poor Forbin! He will be locked up alnight with that sex female computer scientist.

    Parent is a reference to Colossus: The Forbin Project.

    You young whippersnappers that modded the parent off-topic can get off of my lawn now.

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  4. Re:Huh? by jacquesm · · Score: 3, Informative

    The bbc micro sat in a yellow injection moulded plastic case.

    It had no 'expansion slots', but it did have several connectors at the edge of the pcb that you could use for expansion (berg connectors).

    These included:

    - printer port
    - the 'tube', a bi-directional link for a second processor
    - the user port
    - the 1Mhz bus.

    Internally there were a number of option rom sockets, which with some trickery could be used for a ram expansion (bank switched 16 k windows).

    There were no 'slots' of any kind.

    I'm not sure which computer you are referring to here but I have never seen a bbc model b encased in anything other than plastic unless it was done as a custom job.

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