The Centre for Computing History is a museum in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

, England, established to create a permanent public exhibition telling the story of the

Information Age The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during ...

Overview

The museum acts as a repository for vintage computers and related artefacts. The museum is open Wednesdays through to Sundays from 10am to 5pm in term time and 7 days a week during school holidays. On display are key items from the early era of computers (and even before) from ageing

comptometer The Comptometer was the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, patented in the United States by Dorr Felt in 1887. A key-driven calculator is extremely fast because each key adds or subtracts its value to the accumulato ...

s through the Altair 8800 to the

Sinclair ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colour ...

and Apple II series. The museum also holds vintage games consoles, peripherals,

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

and an extensive collection of computer manuals, magazines and other literature. It is home to the Megaprocessor, an enormous version of a computer chip designed by James Newman.

History and status

The centre is a registered educational charity. It is funded by a combination of sponsors from local businesses and private individuals. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur

Hermann Hauser Hermann Maria Hauser, KBE, FRS, FREng, FInstP, CPhys (born 1948) is an Austrian-born entrepreneur, venture capitalist and inventor who is primarily associated with the Cambridge technology community in England. Education and early life W ...

was involved with funding discussions. He became patron of the museum in December 2011, 30 years after the launch of the

BBC Micro The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers in the 1980s for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed with an emphas ...

. The museum is run by a board of trustees chaired by Gareth Marlow. The Centre moved to a site in Rene Court, off Coldham's Lane in the east side of Cambridge in summer 2013. The museum was originally located in

Haverhill, Suffolk Haverhill ( , ) is a market town and civil parish in the county of Suffolk, England, next to the borders of Essex and Cambridgeshire. It lies about south east of Cambridge, south west of Bury St Edmunds, and north west of Braintree and Colche ...

. Plans to relocate the museum to Cambridge, led to a report in October 2011 that negotiations were underway for a site. The museum was informed in June 2012 that planning permission for the new Cambridge site had been granted, subject to complying with current building regulations. In March 2019, the museum was granted Accredited Museum status by Arts Council England (ACE). The Accreditation Scheme sets out nationally agreed standards, which inspire the confidence of the public and funding and governing bodies. It enables museums to assess their current performance, as well as supporting them to plan and develop their services.

Activities

The Centre for Computing History runs regular educational activities for schools and the general public. These range from programming workshops using 1980s

s to gaming tours to coding using software like Scratch for the

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

. The centre also loans artefacts for film and TV productions and has helped with props and sets for '' The IT Crowd'', '' Brits Who Made the Modern World'' on Channel Five with

Peter Snow Peter John Snow (born 20 April 1938) is a British radio and television presenter and historian. Between 1969 and 2005, he was an analyst of general election results, first on ITV and later for the BBC. He presented ''Newsnight'' from its la ...

and in April 2009 produced the ''Gadget Hall of Fame'' stand at ''

The Gadget Show ''The Gadget Show'' (currently known as ''The Gadget Show: Better Tech, Better Life'') is a British television series which focuses on consumer technology. The show, which is broadcast on Channel 5, is currently presented by Ortis Deley, Geo ...

Live'' exhibition at the

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...

. In December 2018, the centre was involved in a groundbreaking interactive Netflix episode of Black Mirror called

Bandersnatch A bandersnatch is a fictional creature in Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel ''Through the Looking-Glass'' and his 1874 poem ''The Hunting of the Snark''. Although neither work describes the appearance of a bandersnatch in great detail, in ''The Hunting ...

. The centre collects and preserves historical computing related artefacts and has undertaken a project to preserve the data from the

BBC Domesday Project The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers, Philips, Logica, and the BBC (with some funding from the European Commission's ESPRIT programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original ''Domesday Book'', an 11th-centu ...

and make it available online. They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public. The centre's oldest working machine is their Elliott 903, which is regularly demonstrated; other important artefacts in the centre's collection include a prototype ZX Spectrum, Professor Steve Furber's Computer Group prototype and a NeXT computer signed by

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

. In June 2017, some of the centre's volunteers received recognition for their contributions to the museum at the annual SHARE Museums East Volunteer Awards. In October 2018, the centre received lottery funding for a project on LEO computers, in partnership with the LEO Computers Society. The project, Swiss Rolls, Tea and the Electronic Office: A History of LEO, the First Business Computer, aims to bring together, preserve, archive and digitise a range of LEO Computers artefacts, documents and personal memories to share the largely unknown story of LEO with a new audience. The project includes plans to develop a virtual reality replica of the LEO I. The centre was awarded an Object of The Year award from 'Museums in Cambridgeshire' in November 2019 for their

Sinclair Sinclair may refer to: Places * Lake Sinclair, near Milledgeville, Georgia * Sinclair, Iowa * Sinclair, West Virginia * Sinclair, Wyoming * Sinclair Mills, British Columbia * Sinclair Township, Minnesota * Sinclair, Manitoba People * ...

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colou ...

prototype, donated earlier that year from a company that had worked on it during its development. With their extensive collection of over 13,000 video games, the centre also has a leading video game preservation initiative, and information for every object in the museum collection is accessible via the online catalogue. As part of preservation, they digitally archive source code for games such as the Magic Knight series by

David Jones (programmer) David Jones is a former freelance computer game programmer who was prolific in the mid-to-late 1980s. He is best known for the creation of the cult computer game character Magic Knight in his 1985 game ''Finders Keepers'' for the Mastertronic ...

, and preserve and host scans of original sketches and other development materials from game companies such as

Guerrilla Games Guerrilla B.V. (trade name: Guerrilla Games) is a Dutch First-party developer, first-party video game developer based in Amsterdam and part of PlayStation Studios. The company was founded as Lost Boys Games in January 2000 through the merger of ...

. Their work emphasises the importance of preserving all aspects of the experience of a game, from marketing materials to the copy protection experience, packaging, and hardware. The centre's collection also hosts uncommon hardware and operating systems with this in mind. They are also working with current video game developers and publishers, acting as a repository for their ongoing work so that it is actively preserved.

References

External links

The Centre for Computing History website
* Inside a museum with byte and big dreams, ''East Anglian Daily Times'', 3 Jun 200

* Haverhill's Computer Museum to feature on TV, ''Haverhill-UK'', 20 Aug 200

* Haverhill's Centre for Computing History opens 13 and 14 September, ''Haverhill-UK'', 2 Sep 200

* Play vintage computer games, ''Haverhill Echo'', 11 Sep 200

* Museum tells story behind every screen, ''Cambridge Evening News'', 29 Sep 200

* Museum props up set for hit comedy, ''Cambridge Evening News'', 30 Dec 200

* Gadget Show Live — Huge success for Haverhill, ''Haverhill-UK'', 23 Apr 200

* Gadget Hall of Fame: which did you own?, ''MSN Tech & Gadgets'', 28 Apr 200

* BBC date for computing centre curator, ''Haverhill Echo'', 8 Oct 200

* Museum-piece computers programmed into TV show, ''Haverhill Weekly News'', 8 Oct 200

* Giant £40,000 megaprocessor on display in Cambridge, ''Cambridge Evening News'', 28 Nov 201

* Guinness World Record for Cambridge's MegaProcessor, ''Cambridge Evening News'', 14 Apr 201

* Cambridge museum celebrates history of women in computing, ''BBC News Cambridgeshire'', 14 Oct 201

{{DEFAULTSORT:Centre for Computing History 2008 establishments in England Charities based in Cambridgeshire Computer museums Computer museums in the United Kingdom Museums established in 2008 Museums in Cambridge Science and technology in Cambridgeshire