A hands-on history of the digital age
The Centre for Computing History (CCH) in Cambridge, England, is an interactive collection dedicated to the Information Age. Established as an educational charity in 2006, it moved to its current Cambridge location in 2013. The museum's core mission is to preserve the artifacts and stories of the computing revolution and make them accessible. Its collection includes thousands of items, ranging from early mechanical calculators to the home computers of the 1980s and modern game consoles. The archive contains over 1,300 computers, 15,000 video games, and thousands of software packages, manuals, and magazines.
The museum documents the deep social and cultural changes brought about by computing. A significant part of its collection is dedicated to the British microcomputer boom of the 1980s, featuring an extensive array of machines from companies like Acorn and Sinclair. Cambridge is a home for the museum, as the city was important to the history of computing. The University of Cambridge developed the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), one of the world's first stored-program computers, which ran its first program in 1949. Later, Cambridge-based companies like Acorn, creators of the BBC Micro, were central to the personal computer revolution in the UK.
From room-sized machines to pocket power
The Centre for Computing History's exhibits are arranged to guide visitors through the evolution of digital technology. One of the most distinctive exhibits is the Megaprocessor. Built by hobbyist James Newman, it is a room-sized recreation of a microprocessor, measuring nearly 10 meters long and 2 meters high. It contains 40,000 individual transistors and over 10,500 LEDs that light up to show data moving and logic operations happening in real-time. This allows visitors to visualize the inner workings of a computer chip on a massive scale. The Megaprocessor runs at a top speed of about 20 kilohertz, but can be slowed down to demonstrate processes step-by-step.
The museum features a large collection of famous personal computers, including the Altair 8800, Apple II, and Commodore PET. Many of these vintage machines are fully functional, allowing visitors to type programs in BASIC or play classic video games. An entire area is set up as a 1980s classroom, filled with working BBC Micros. The collection also includes rare items like a prototype Sinclair ZX Spectrum and a NeXT computer signed by Tim Berners-Lee. The museum's preservation efforts extend to software and data, including a project to recover information from the BBC Domesday Project from 1986.