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directive0

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Was over in England for a wedding and took some time to go to the National Computer Museum here. Got a chance to see the Colossus, an arguable pre-cursor to the modern computer and couldn't help but take a quick pic of my Pandora.

I don't want to get into a debate about how the Colossus isn't really a "computer" but its still a distant relative. Kinda fun to see how far things have come.
 

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Isn't there a thread with pictures of Pandoras in interesting places? This would go great in that thread. If I was imagining it, then maybe we can put those kind of pics here.
 
Nice pic! :)

Am I the only one thinking that it'd be really cool to take a pandora there and use it to run a Colossus emulator? ;)

-Neelix
 
Nice pic! :)

Am I the only one thinking that it'd be really cool to take a pandora there and use it to run a Colossus emulator? ;)

-Neelix
I am pretty sure that ptitSeb already did it, just did not released it.
 
congrats, cool colossus you have there! :)
this picture is a great timelapse, thanks for sharing!
 
Hi all :)
Isn't there a thread with pictures of Pandoras in interesting places? This would go great in that thread. If I was imagining it, then maybe we can put those kind of pics here.
@rygD : I think the thread you are referring to is this one.

Cheers, Magic Sam
 
Tried my best to find a thread like that and never did. Figures. I would appreciate if a mod moved it into that thread for me, no sense having a separate one.
 
No need to make work for mods IMO. If you want your photo in that thread, post it there and let this thread die.

Edit: Or stand on its own merits, perhaps.
 
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Agreed, to me this holds up well as it's own thread.
 
With infinite cats walking on infinite computer keyboards those same calculations will almost surely be calculated, or something like that.

I just hope someone is taking pictures or making a video.
 
I thought you guys might like to hear about some more of this museums attractions. It's one of the more impressive computer museums I've been to. That's hardly surprising since its located at Bletchley Park, arguably the birthplace of modern cryptography and computing machines. I was hard pressed to name a machine they didn't have on display, and their collection spans the gamut from heavy metal to home consoles.

The high point of my visit by far though was that I got to see (and operate!) the WITCH Dekatron computer. It uses Dekatron tubes as a means of storing and displaying information. It's one of the very first stored program computers, and has the added novelty of being decimal based; not binary. I'm stitching what little video I shot together that shows its operation but for right now here is a nice picture of it.
 

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That is one of the places I have wanted to visit for the last 15 years or so.
 
As I understand it they're really been ramping up their visitor experience over the past 5-10 years, so if you had visited 15 years ago you might not have been as impressed as you would be today.
 
Some of the stuff that interests me most was probably there in recent decades, possibly as far back as the 40s. All the recent additions would be like rolling two cool things into one trip.
 
Yeah after seeing colossus and the WITCH a room full BBC Micros or a bunch of retro consoles didn't really have the same impact.
 
Hey all, I made a short video showing a couple big highlights of my trip to Bletchley and the National Museum of Computing. Hope you dig it.

I wish there'd be a museum with something similar for a modern system where you can actually see everything that is happening via a structure of microscopes and huge screens.
 
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