Tuesday, February 2, 2010

BBC articles on British computer pioneers

The BBC are running a week-long series of articles on the history of British computing. The first is on GCHQ, the second is on Colossus at Bletchley.

Although the articles are interesting, I'm slightly dubious about some of the claims "It was not until the 1990s that general purpose machines could match Oedipus for searching through a database and finding a particular term, said Prof Lavington."

The article contains an interesting link map of the people involved. The link map includes the NPL Ace Pilot. The NPL is the National Physical Laboratory, and I was driven past on my way to school every day. Back then it looked like a science laboratory covered in odd shaped objects and brick buildings. Unfortunately the photos on the history page fail to capture this ramshackle nature.

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