Google brings Bletchley Park to its Cultural Institute (video)

Bletchley Park, home of the codebreakers, comes to Googles Cultural Institute video

For an unsentimental Silicon Valley giant, Google does have a soft spot for Bletchley Park, the wartime home of Alan Turing and his codebreakers. Having previously donated $850,000 to help restore the site, which now houses the National Museum of Computing, Mountain View has now welcomed pictures and testimony from those who were there to its own online museum, the Google Cultural Institute. There's video after the break, and you can head down to the source links to find out more about the vital work that took place.

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Source: Offical Google Blog, Google Cultural Institute

Harwell Dekatron revived as the world’s oldest working, original digital computer

Harwell Dekatron gets a reboot, becomes the world's oldest working, original digital computer

Over 60 years since the first digital computers switched on, the chances of seeing one of these pioneers in action have grown incredibly slim as time (and recycling) takes its toll. Take a visit to Britain's National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park as of today, however, and you'll see one working. A finished 3-year restoration effort lets the Harwell Dekatron -- at one point renamed the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell, or WITCH -- claim the title of the world's oldest functional digital computer still using its original design. Aside from its room-filling dimensions, the 1951-era mainframe may be worth the trip just for recalling a time when there were no hard and fast rules in computing: the Dekatron operates in its namesake decimal system, not binary, and puts most of its components on full display. The computer is part of the regular exhibit lineup and should be easy to see; the daunting part may be realizing that virtually any chip in a 2012 smartphone could outmuscle the Dekatron without breaking a sweat.

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Via: Slashdot

Source: National Museum of Computing