‘It is a far cry from the early days of
BBC Micros still teaching young people to code in the 1980s classroom.
EvEn BEfORE Milton Keynes was founded, computing was making huge advances in Bletchley. But only a very small number of people knew. Eventually, eight years after Milton Keynes was founded, the secret came out - in 1975, Colossus dating from 1943-44, was revealed as the world’s first electronic computer. Used for cracking Lorenz, Hitler’s most secret cipher, the Colossus computers had, by 1967, long since been dismantled or removed from Milton Keynes but today the Colossus Rebuild in The national Museum of Computing on Bletchley Park attracts visitors from all over the world eager to see the
beginnings of the digital age. One or two of the first
organisations to enter the fledgling new town in 1967 might have brought with them an Elliott computer, a machine in use nationally in some local authorities, large businesses and academic institutions. Two Elliott computers can be seen in operation at The national Museum of Computing today, showing student groups what computing used to be like with paper tape but no monitors. These Elliott computers were
much smaller than the room-sized valve-based earlier computers, but would have each cost something like
Colossus rebuilt.
a row of houses at the time with capabilities of only a miniscule fraction of today’s smartphones. Then, in 1968, the pace of computing accelerated and a new company familiar to many people today was created. International Computers Limited was formed from a merger of several other British companies as the British government tried to encourage the creation of a powerful national computer company.
Among the output of ICL, their mainframes went on to become ubiquitous and in time would have handled, for example, the payrolls of many of Milton Keynes’ new residents. One of the world’s two last surviving ICL 2966s today occupies most of the Large Systems Room at the museum and looks to the modern eye like a laundrette installation. These monster mainframes required their own air- conditioned and ultra-clean rooms.
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