Centre for Computing History, Cambridge
Nov. 30th, 2014 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerBefore heading back home from Cambridge this morning we managed to squeeze in a visit to somewhere I've been looking to look around for a while: the Centre for Computing History.
The CCH is tucked away down a small road in an industrial estate behind the retail park (if you've ever wondered if there's anything worth making that weird hairpin bend at the south end of Coldham's Lane railway bridge for, now you now). It has a couple of themed rooms opening onto a small warehouse organised by broad theme (1970s, consoles, mechanical and electronic calculators, early home computers etc), although like a lot of specialist museums it can only display part of its collection. Many of its exhibits are in working order and are left running, so if you want to have a go at programming in BBC Basic or playing Space Invaders on an original Atari home games system, the CCH is the place for you.
I did warn![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
attimesbracing that I would probably succumb to extreme nostalgia overload during my tour, and I wasn't wrong. Mind you, she had the odd squee at exhibits like 1990s mobile phones or the Commodore 64 (she well recalled the infamous carpet-singing power brick). In approximate chronological order, here are a few of my personal highlights:
The earliest days in the UK of 8-bit home computing: the Science of Cambridge MK14 and the Acorn System 1. Science of Cambridge was one of the many incarnations of Sinclair, with the MK14* being the predecessor to the ZX series of computers. A friend of mine used one to control his homebuilt 30-foot steerable radio telescope, and it was the first computer I ever played a real-time game on - a simple lunar lander simulation.
(*Supposedly standing for 'Microcomputer Kit', but often abbreviated 'Mk 14' as in 'Mark', even on the front of its own manual, as you can see.)
The original PET 2001 from Commodore. Woking had one of the UK's first dedicated computer shops, and I remember pressing my nose to the window at age 9 or so at the sight of one of these. To make space for its internal tape deck it had the infamous 'chiclet' keyboard - still a sight better than what Uncle Clive was about to inflict on us all - and a tiny screen. By the time I got to join the computer club at school circa 1982 the PET 2001 was long obsolete, although we had one stuck in the corner, having been supplanted by several of these:
This is the later version of the PET, with full-size proper keyboard and 32K memory. Actually, this claims to be a CBM 4032, but it has the 9" monitor of the older version of the PET rather than the 12" monitor of 4000-series, and I wonder if it's really the intermediate 3032. OK, enough nitpicking geekiness. Anyway, the huge lump next to it is the 8250 dual disk drive. This was notorious for being very slow, as well as requiring an unbelievably arcane command syntax to use. We had a network of these newer PETs at school connected with this disk drive; I remember you had to check if anyone else was loading or saving because the system didn't cope well with more than one machine trying to access the floppy drive at once. We also had very loud dot matrix printer (I recall dumping Fourier analysis of solar flare radio recordings to it) and a positively deafening daisywheel printer for neat printouts.
What we didn't have was one of these, which must have been unusual for schools at the time (well, UK schools with any sort of computer room.)
This is the RM 380Z. Simple but (like the PET) built like a tank.
Now here's the real nostalgia display:
From the top: Sinclair Research ZX80, (L) Jupiter Ace, (R) Sinclair Spectrum 128, (L) Oric 1, (R) Oric Atmos, Acorn Electron (with external expansion pack and disk drive), (L) Acorn Atom (unusual black version), Camputers Lynx
The ZX80 was the first cheap home computer you could program in Basic, although it used a very cut-down version. The Jupiter Ace used FORTH, which gave it a performance edge but fatally compromised attempts to sell it to the home and school markets. The Atom was the precursor to the BBC Micro; the Electron a cut-down and simplified version of the Beeb. The Lynx was one of a number of computers that were quite well-specified for their time, but just got squeezed out between Acorn and Sinclair.
Sinclair's infamousmotorized loo roll dispenser printer. Burning blurry, ill-registered, low-resolution text onto a narrow strip of silvered paper, this was the only way Sinclair owners could produce hard copy for several years. I still have old copies of the magazine of a UK amateur astronomers' computer group with program listings pasted up from ZX printer printouts. (Mind you, since I didn't have a printer at all for my HP-41CX programmable calculator, I laboriously produced listings on a manual typewriter!)
By the time I was 16 or so, this was pretty much the view I got walking into the school computer lab: rows of BBC Micros. We had one at home, which I used for writing solar system simulations and painfully slow Mandelbrot set renderers, as well as playing Elite. At university we learned 6502 assembler on them, and when I was posted to my first tour as an RAF engineering officer in 1991, I was amused to find that the built-in diagnostic system for the Plessey Type 93 radar I ran maintenance for was a Beeb.
There was far more than this small sample, including examples of old mainframes with top-loading platter hard drives that actually were the size of washing machines, and an evolutionary line-up of Apple machines from the Apple II through Lisa, Macintosh and early iMac. There was also a lab with more recent equipment, including Raspberry Pi teaching systems and an Oculus Rift demo setup.
If you're in Cambridge, the CCH is only £7 to visit, and will probably induce a serious bout of retro-computing nostalgia. My only disappointment was that they didn't have a wider range of their calculator collection on display, but then I have my own personal museum in that regard...!
The CCH is tucked away down a small road in an industrial estate behind the retail park (if you've ever wondered if there's anything worth making that weird hairpin bend at the south end of Coldham's Lane railway bridge for, now you now). It has a couple of themed rooms opening onto a small warehouse organised by broad theme (1970s, consoles, mechanical and electronic calculators, early home computers etc), although like a lot of specialist museums it can only display part of its collection. Many of its exhibits are in working order and are left running, so if you want to have a go at programming in BBC Basic or playing Space Invaders on an original Atari home games system, the CCH is the place for you.
I did warn
attimesbracing that I would probably succumb to extreme nostalgia overload during my tour, and I wasn't wrong. Mind you, she had the odd squee at exhibits like 1990s mobile phones or the Commodore 64 (she well recalled the infamous carpet-singing power brick). In approximate chronological order, here are a few of my personal highlights:
The earliest days in the UK of 8-bit home computing: the Science of Cambridge MK14 and the Acorn System 1. Science of Cambridge was one of the many incarnations of Sinclair, with the MK14* being the predecessor to the ZX series of computers. A friend of mine used one to control his homebuilt 30-foot steerable radio telescope, and it was the first computer I ever played a real-time game on - a simple lunar lander simulation.
(*Supposedly standing for 'Microcomputer Kit', but often abbreviated 'Mk 14' as in 'Mark', even on the front of its own manual, as you can see.)
The original PET 2001 from Commodore. Woking had one of the UK's first dedicated computer shops, and I remember pressing my nose to the window at age 9 or so at the sight of one of these. To make space for its internal tape deck it had the infamous 'chiclet' keyboard - still a sight better than what Uncle Clive was about to inflict on us all - and a tiny screen. By the time I got to join the computer club at school circa 1982 the PET 2001 was long obsolete, although we had one stuck in the corner, having been supplanted by several of these:
This is the later version of the PET, with full-size proper keyboard and 32K memory. Actually, this claims to be a CBM 4032, but it has the 9" monitor of the older version of the PET rather than the 12" monitor of 4000-series, and I wonder if it's really the intermediate 3032. OK, enough nitpicking geekiness. Anyway, the huge lump next to it is the 8250 dual disk drive. This was notorious for being very slow, as well as requiring an unbelievably arcane command syntax to use. We had a network of these newer PETs at school connected with this disk drive; I remember you had to check if anyone else was loading or saving because the system didn't cope well with more than one machine trying to access the floppy drive at once. We also had very loud dot matrix printer (I recall dumping Fourier analysis of solar flare radio recordings to it) and a positively deafening daisywheel printer for neat printouts.
What we didn't have was one of these, which must have been unusual for schools at the time (well, UK schools with any sort of computer room.)
This is the RM 380Z. Simple but (like the PET) built like a tank.
Now here's the real nostalgia display:
From the top: Sinclair Research ZX80, (L) Jupiter Ace, (R) Sinclair Spectrum 128, (L) Oric 1, (R) Oric Atmos, Acorn Electron (with external expansion pack and disk drive), (L) Acorn Atom (unusual black version), Camputers Lynx
The ZX80 was the first cheap home computer you could program in Basic, although it used a very cut-down version. The Jupiter Ace used FORTH, which gave it a performance edge but fatally compromised attempts to sell it to the home and school markets. The Atom was the precursor to the BBC Micro; the Electron a cut-down and simplified version of the Beeb. The Lynx was one of a number of computers that were quite well-specified for their time, but just got squeezed out between Acorn and Sinclair.
Sinclair's infamous
By the time I was 16 or so, this was pretty much the view I got walking into the school computer lab: rows of BBC Micros. We had one at home, which I used for writing solar system simulations and painfully slow Mandelbrot set renderers, as well as playing Elite. At university we learned 6502 assembler on them, and when I was posted to my first tour as an RAF engineering officer in 1991, I was amused to find that the built-in diagnostic system for the Plessey Type 93 radar I ran maintenance for was a Beeb.
There was far more than this small sample, including examples of old mainframes with top-loading platter hard drives that actually were the size of washing machines, and an evolutionary line-up of Apple machines from the Apple II through Lisa, Macintosh and early iMac. There was also a lab with more recent equipment, including Raspberry Pi teaching systems and an Oculus Rift demo setup.
If you're in Cambridge, the CCH is only £7 to visit, and will probably induce a serious bout of retro-computing nostalgia. My only disappointment was that they didn't have a wider range of their calculator collection on display, but then I have my own personal museum in that regard...!
