I learned about the existence of the computer museum in Cambridge by chance, lazily googling "things to do in Cambridge" literally the night before the trip. On the website The Center for Computing History , in the Visiting section , it is written in red and white that they are closed and when the re-opening is unknown. Nevertheless, I trusted the news about the discovery and was right, so now I have dozens of photos of unique rare pieces of iron, which it would be a sin not to share.
By itself, Cambridge is a small and neat medieval village, it looks something like this:
Everything is within walking distance between parks and gardens, students are chilling everywhere, beauty and grace are everywhere. But IT people must suffer, so the Center for Computer History is actually located in an industrial zone, on the outskirts, away from everything for which people come here in general, right here:
Yes, in one of the hangars, between warehouses and tire changers. Until recently, I doubted that the address was correct and we would not bother with any service station. But no, everything is correct, this is it. In the end, what's inside matters, right?
After the reception desk, the first thing that catches your eye is an interactive stand about the architecture of modern computers. IO, ALU, that's all.
But that's not why they come here.
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— 80-. , - .
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— Raspberry Pi. .
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, ZX Spectrum . , .
Apple, Apple Computer. , , .
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— ZX Spectrum.
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, IBM. , .
Microsoft — Altair 8800.
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NeXTcube . , grayscale 17- . , OS X.
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There is everything ... except the BeBox computer . But in principle, so few of them were released, which is not surprising. If I suddenly get it, I will definitely give it to them.
We didn't go in vain. There are no complaints about the museum, only wishes.
At the exit, you can buy a T-shirt with a witty lettering, stickers, key chains and some Raspberry Pi kits, with little or no extra charge. For reasons I don't understand, there is no Arduino, no flash drives, no actual books ... yes, a lot of things could be thought of for additional monetization, but maybe they don't need it. But at the exit in the yard there is a bunch of free stuff, take it.
Thanks to The Center for Computing History in Cambridge for its existence and invaluable experience.