The National Museum of Computing was absolutely fascinating! To be honest, I was not that excited for this tour. I'm not very interested in computer science, but our tour guide Sheridan was so excited about his topic that it made me excited!
I didn't know anything at all about the enigma machine or all of the code breaking going on there at Bletchley Park! All of those old computers were fascinating because each one just had a specific, simple task but they were so huge! And logical!
I've never seen The Imitation Game, and even though our guide said it's more like "The Irritation Game" because Hollywood got all of the facts wrong, I would still like to learn more about this interesting time in history. It was so cool to see all of these old machines that were still in perfect working condition. We saw the world's oldest working computer, the WITCH, and I even got my name printed in ASCII by the Elliot 903! Here's a link of the WITCH in action: https://photos.app.goo.gl/NpgEwKQVTzVrij7P9
At the end of the tour he mentioned that the museum is not officially accredited, which surprised me. Apparently it's a hassle because the accreditation officials stick their nose into everything and enforce all of their little rules.
There's an interesting division happening because the National Computing Museum and Bletchley Park have so much in common. To quote a Walk The Moon song, Their "Venn diagrams are one circle". Apparently they used to be more connected, but split recently when Bletchley Park decided to apply for lottery money. The people at the National Museum of Computing decided that there were too may strings attached and opted out.
That's so interesting to me. I've never heard of the lottery applying to non profit organizations before, but it sounds a lot like grants. So often in the LIS world, everyone sings the praises of grants. And there's a grant for everything. Need books? There's a grant for that. Need to build a programming space at your library? There's a grant for that! But all of those grants have strings attached, just like the lottery.
Before accepting or even applying for grant money, it's important to consider if you actually want to go ahead with the stipulations of that organization. Grants may seem like an opportunity for free money, but it always comes at a cost.
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