The other weekend I had the chance to visit both the Centre for Computing History and the Cambridge Museum of Technology.
We first visited the Centre for Computing history, the entrance houses a small shop and seating area, serviced by a tuck shop. Along one wall is a giant game of tetris powered by a World Record Breaking "Mega Computer" which is a 10m long functional microprocessor model where you can literally see inside the registers, arithmetic unit and interfacing logic.
There's also a small display area here which housed some unique displays such as a prototype Zx Spectrum and some of Sir Clive Sinclair's less well known inventions.
On from the foyer is an old class room with a number of classic teaching computers such as the BBC Micro and Archimedes. There's as some robots and games to play.
After the classroom is the main display hall which is pretty large. This has some old business computers and a large number of games machines. A history section leads through from the famous Lyon's Tea Room computer through the microcomputer age and to some devices that could even be recognised as modern.
I even managed to get some inspiration for my Rugged Workshop Computer project.
Definitely worth a visit, you can easily spend an hour or two looking at the exhibits or more if you get lost in a game of sonic the hedgehog. But be warned there is often a queue to play tennis on the Wii console.
Over the road at the Cambridge Museum of technology the majority of the exhibits are a lot older with steam engines and old machine tools being their primary display.
However, I wasn't aware till I visited of the Pye Exhibition Building.
As the sign says, this looks at the birth of high-tech Cambridge with some of the products produced by W. G. Pye & Co. Ltd. They started out in scientific instruments and there are some great examples of devices like the resistance box and wheatstone bridge below.
Pye moved into making radios and that branched into a much wider range of consumer and industrial telecommunications devices such as TV cameras, telephone exchanges and broadcast equipment.
So even if you are not a fan of oily old boilers then I can still recommend a visit to the Cambridge Museum of Technolgy for the Pye Building alone.
