Posts Visiting Portobello Road on a Sunday, the Notting Hill Gate Library was closed. Pity, as it looked fascinating:
On Saturday, we visited Bletchley Park. About 40 minutes by train out of London, this old manor house was the centre of English codebreaking during World War Two. There Alan Turing designed the Bombe and Tommy Flowers created the Colossus , two machines that were forerunners to today’s programmable computers. It is fitting that the National Museum of Computing is now located there. It is in one of the old codebreakers’ huts, and as a self-funded privately created organisation it is not posh looking:
One of the rooms that fascinated me was dedicated to Powers Samas punchcard computers. In the early weeks of my technology unit, I show students an image from Christchurch City Libraries in 1958 showing some of the first library automation efforts – using Powers Samas punchcards:
Bletchley Park not only has information about the codebreakers, but has a fully reconstructed working Bombe, a model railway exhibition, a cottage full of a collection of children’s toys from 1930′s – 60′s, a wartime post office, several working Enigma crpytographic machines, and even a room dedicated to the exploits of heroic wartime pigeons like William of Orange .
I took a snap of the library in the manor house as the light faded. The whole building felt like a Cluedo set come to life.
heh – co-incidently I’ve just finished a book about Bletchley Park and was thinking it would be a place I’d like to visit!
Neat that you could go there.