These Machines Need to be Studied
Thank you to sponsor Hypershell! https://hypershell.tech/a/omnitrack/34d9c712 ~ We went to The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park to look at incredible machines such as The Bombe, Tunny, Colossus, EDSAC, Marconi TAC, ICL 2996, Hollerith HEC and The Witch. These machines are crucial to the birth and modernisation of computers, and this museum is a must see.
Thank you to @tnmoc for allowing us access and to Robert for educating us on these pieces of computing history.
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Bletchley Park: https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
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@Nostalgianerd
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Thank you to TNMOC and to sponsor Hypershell! https://hypershell.tech/a/omnitrack/34d9c712
@willburnmydread
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
What's the power bill for this place?
@38911bytefree
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Those guys back in the day were nuts !!!!!!!!!!!. Great explanations. The guy knows every bit of the machines.
@rookenzone
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
What an awesome tour, gotta love the enthusiasm. I've been meaning to get down here for some time now… Soon™.
@TeeborGames
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I remember when I was last there they were still working on fixing the Marconi TAC 28:18 They had a nice gentleman from Russia over to help them figure out why it was not working. If I remember correctly they had discovered fairly recently that one of two diagnostic LEDs was not working, making it hard to find any other issues.
@timdene
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I'm so glad you gave time to the experts at the museum. I have been several times and it's still amazing to hear and try to comprehend the genius. They're so passionate and knowledgeable, I highly recommend a visit.
@bignosemac1
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
And a Triumph Staaaag at the end!
@RetroCabeza
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I didn't undertood half a thing but this was fascinating.
@smallestprophet
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
i'm gonna ask my gp if the nhs will pay for a hypershell for me
@ancipital
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I done bits on a 2966 during work experience including loading the disk packs.
One of my early jobs in banking meant had to do occasional operator bits on a 2966, the thing was finicky and would crash if you accidently banged something into it, it was finally replaced by a 3966 that was a fraction of the size and ICL managed to do something impressive – buck the trend and produce something that was slower than the 2966 it replaced, batch runs used to take about an hour to 2 hours longer on it.
Also – you could run a hypervisor on the 2966 called CME – Concurrent Machine Environment (or was it DME – Direct Machine Environment?), basically, this meant you could run older George 3 programs that were I think originally came from the 1966 at the same time as VME (Virtual Machine Environment) so quite funky for the time to basically have 2 OS's running at the same time.
So to give an idea – my first real job started with DEC VMS running on an 8600 and also an early version of Sun Unix – can't remember whether it was called Solaris back then!
@maddingue
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I went twice to Bletchley Park + the National Museum of Computing a couple of years ago. I went a great experience 🤩
It’s nice to see that some things have changed because, if I remember correctly , the ICL wasn’t running when I visited. Kinda makes me want to go back. Something that flabbergasted me back then was when I stumbled upon a magnetic memory core. Search this online. Then go to the NMoC to see how tiny that is 🤯
Anyway, thanks for the video, and to everyone who hasn’t be there already, try to make a visit, it’s a paradise for computer history nerds
@Thomsonicus
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Still no Poles in Enigma cracking? Yeah, no Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain too, right?
@SusanAmberBruce
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Glad to see the ICL, great video thanks.
@kellmeister2k
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Holy crap, this is mind bending. These codebreakers were amazing. I can't even begin to follow the explanation for how it worked.
@SalvadorButtersworth
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
"A team of mostly women"
Wow that's amazing. I wonder why that was the first and last time women were the leaders in any field, craft, profession, or hobby? But it's definitely true, I'm sure.
@techkev140
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Amazing video!
@Zeem4
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I went there when I attended VCF UK, I think that was in 2010. It was fantastic, I really must go there again.
@BenRattigan
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
The cryptography part was more confusing than a Ted Rogers riddle.
@dizwell
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Bill Tutte deserves to be on a £100 note: his was a phenomenal intellectual achievement. Cracking a machine by thought alone. And that mural of Tommy Flowers was a delight to see: he ought to be on the £500 note!!
@MrDuncl
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
An interesting visit.
When I went there in 1994 they were quite proud of a Pentium (1) PC Olivetti had donated for general use during the Colossus build. I wonder if that is now in the historic PCs section ?
@crunchyfrog555
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I used to use one of those punch tape teletype machines every day in the early 1980s. We had a couple of NCR mainframes where I worked, but we also had an older earlier NCR System 75 used mostly for wages and a couple of bits of housekeeping. I loved it – it didn't have a screen, just a golfball typewriter, and a load of tactile switches, dials and flashing lights, plus a punch tape reader – hence why I used a teletype every day.
I would have to manually type out a small punch tape just to boot the machine up.
There's something really lovely about twisting dials and manually toggling switches. This might be part of the reason why I have so many synthesizers now.
@vibingwithvinyl
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
This was interesting. I've always been fascinated about the Enigma machine and code breaking.
@mcbpete
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
14:11 This is what my mum hears when I try to explain how to switch the TV over from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2
@dlbiggins
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I've seen people threatened with firing for putting down a disk pack that hard.
@crunchyfrog555
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Dear God, I would seriously love to try out one of those exoskeletons.
I've got spina bifida myself so walking, bending, carrying and all that is very difficult. Also I've done various bits of work with disabled groups over the years, especially at music festivals. I'd love to be able to get my hands on one not just to see how it works out for me, but to offer feedback to others who it might apply to. It'd be bloody awesome for a load of people who have trouble plodding round Glastonbury for instance.
@AttilaSVK
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I've been there about 6 years ago, it was one of the greatest days in my life. I'd like to return there for sure 🙂
@janedoe3043
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
A wizard did it. Got it!
@Frostwize
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
great video really great. nice robotic pants too, reminds me of a red dwarf episode with robotic boots
@edwardburek1717
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
This museum is one of the most fascinating pieces of education that anyone can ever have. I visited the place a year before the Worldwide Case Of Sniffles, as part of a trifecta of museum visitations – the others being Bletchley Park itself, and an independently run amateur radio museum housed inside the park complex. I urge anyone to visit these places at Bletchley, the home of the Codebreakers – and the Loudmakers (because Marshall amps have their HQ there as well).
@MartinBrenner
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Milton Keynes, the maybe strangest planned city it the UK, and probably not the typical tourist destination, but Bletchley Park is absolutely fascinating. While TNMOC has the amazing and running machines and excellent guides, the "other", main Bletchley Park site has the history of the site and also some basic explanations of how the decrypting with Bombe worked. If you fly into London you can get to Bletchley by train and Bletchley Park is only a short walk from the station.
@Mervin-Bunter
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Top video of this channel
@winstonsmith478
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Well done! I really wish I could visit that museum, but AI tells me that the straight-line, great-circle distance from me is 4,686 miles (7,542 km).
@mbrit
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Oh you went there!
@terminalterminus
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Got to talk to Tony Sale whilst he was doing final commissioning on that Colossus. Came across a lovely bloke, shame when he died…
@Fenlander456
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I still work on the VME operating system that would have been running on the ICL 2900 series mainframes, it runs emulated on Linux nowadays though. It is in it's final few years now, but that's a pretty good run for an OS that has existed since the mid 70's.
@kludgie
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I’ve been a professional coder for about 30 years and the description of how the cracking machines worked still flies over my head!
@LevitatingCups
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
start of the video feels like, you entered a new area in old game (like hl1) and the npc takes a while to realize "ah time to execute the animation"
@8bvg300
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Nod. Smile. Pretend you know what’s going on 😅
@TesseractE
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Added to the list. Planning to head to the UK to see all these computing museums in a few years. 👍
@RoundSparrow
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Licensed music use by a 600K subscriber YouTuber … rare!
@Eireman_on_Twitch
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
That place would have to throw me out. Yes, I have a machine that has 32 64-bit CPUs, all with floating point units, multithreading, and up to 5GHz clock with independent clock per CPU segment… and the MOS 6502/6510 running 8-bits at 1MHz makes me happy! I grew up with Tandy TRS-80s, Commodore PETs and C64s, and Apple IIs, and sometimes it’s nice to just unplug the internet and poke at a simple machine and watch the result on a green phosphor screen.
@Mr_Ceiling_Fan
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
This museum should have an addition, room full of women dressed in correct attire from the time operating tabulating machines, smoking and drinking coffee…. Or, was smoking allowed in tabulating machine rooms? I don't remember, it's been a hot minute.
@techanthology
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
I am so jealous. I wish I lived close enough to visit there with out a transatlantic flight.
@therealchayd
August 31, 2026 at 11:36 pm
Wow, this beings back memories – I used to volunteer there about 5 years back. Great team of people! Interesting to see how all the exhibits have evolved over the years.