Prompt's TechBlog

Earlier this year, the Science Museum in London hosted a travelling exhibition of computer games. It was great because you could play them - feel the vibrations of the sound effects, see how the vector games burned bright dots in the screen. Now that exhibition has moved on, there's nowhere you can go to experience historic hardware, unless you're content to look at its case and read about it.

Now there are proposals to create a museum dedicated to the UK's pioneering role in the computer industry, which will include restored machines and reconstructions. The site is to be Bletchley Park, home to the code breakers in World War II and birthplace of many landmark machines, including the Colossus code-breaker. The emphasis seems to be on early industrial and business machines, and on reconstructing the history of early computing before those involved have all passed on. It would be nice to see the exhibits extended into the much later home computing era too, when Sinclair taught us all how to program Basic and dodge monsters in manic mines. To be fair, that era is becoming well documented with magazines like Retro Gamer interviewing those who were involved at the time. But if you want to experience a colour clash, you still need to befriend a hobbyist who's preserved a machine.

The stumbling block for the new museum could be finance: they need to raise a quarter of a million pounds for the project to be viable. The machines are all waiting - they just need to be displayed.

I hope they manage it. With computers and communications tools on every desktop and in every pocket, it's easy to take them for granted. But we didn't get here overnight, and many great ideas and pioneers should be part of our recorded history. It's only when you see the machines working that you can truly appreciate them.