
Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum - edward
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/08/28/pay-a-visit-to-cambridges-computer-museum/
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SmellyGeekBoy
The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is well worth a visit, too!

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mothsonasloth
Yes go there but be aware of a slight subtlety.

Although the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is inside Bletchely park. It
is a different organisation.

TNMOC has all the interesting computers and the Bletchely park trust has the
land and buildings.

There is still a political battle going on between the two (which is sad).
They put fences around TNMOC as though to keep people from wandering in there.

\- I am a TNMOC member

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shellac
Yep, those fences are awful. You need to essentially walk through a car park
and keep going to find TNMOC.

But it is wonderful. Far better than next door, to be honest.

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gerjomarty
Well worth a visit if you're in or around Cambridge.

Huge props to the person in charge when we visited for letting us upstairs to
their usually closed storage space with hundreds of old games, magazines, and
boxes of old tech.

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Steve44
I went 2-3 years ago and really enjoyed it, there is so much to see and they
have a lot of unusual exhibits.

My main gripe, which I did feed back at the time, was they had a wide
selection of vintage computers and consoles running but there were no
instructions. It’s a long time since I’d used any of them and had forgotten
much of even the basics,;they also had Spectrum with the SSD type libraries
but again no instructions on how to load and use the games. That meant you
could look at them, try and type a couple of things in and hope you get lucky,
then move on to the next item feeling frustrated.

The museum is continually evolving so I hope that something has been done to
help what I felt was a fairly big shortcoming. I appreciate it’s a lot of work
creating cue-cards for each one but as you’re encouraged to have a play around
it would greatly add to the experience.

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fit2rule
I run a similar, albeit way smaller exhibit here in Vienna, and we are working
on small instruction booklets we can give visitors who want to type things in
and play with things .. perhaps I should make these available somehow when
we're finished.

That said, its quite an adventure to return to that era of computing and re-
discover all the old tricks. On some of these machines, there are even still
new graphics modes and other features being uncovered by avid hackers. 8-bit
machines are still alive!

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n4r9
I visited several years ago, it's a real hidden gem. Spent a fun hour or so
implementing a prime sieve on a BBC BASIC computer - an adventure for someone
in their early thirties! My friend and I also banged our heads against that
old text-based Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game, trying but failing to get
even as far as getting onto the space ship. At the other end of the spectrum
it was also my first experience of a VR helmet.

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kitd
If you're in the Portsmouth, UK area, Portsmouth Museum also has a couple of
rooms given over to old games consoles from the 1980s onwards. Some are still
running and you can play on them.

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n4r9
Amazing; I'm actually planning to be there in a few weeks so will check it
out. Thanks!

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jslakro
Great! .. this make me think about a missing info on geek/nerd/techie
touristic points of interest, like that kind of destination you could include
when go on vacation with your family

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twic
Wikivoyage has content that may be relevant to your interests:

[https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Science_tourism](https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Science_tourism)

See also the 'related topics' section.

I swear i came across a "tour guide for engineers" somewhere that was similar
to this, but i can't find it now.

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pimlottc
Cambridge, UK. I clicked expecting Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whoops!

