A tour round The National Museum of Computing

Although the museum's main focus is on the pioneering computers which started the whole digital ball rolling, one recently opened addition to the many exhibits is the Personal Computing Gallery. It's a bit flasher than some of the other areas, and makes an effort to be interactive without going too far.

This really is personal computing 'Nerdvana', and we couldn't help ourselves from chanting the mantra: "Had one of those, had one of those, still got one of those, really wanted one of those but my mum wouldn't buy it..." along with every other visitor.

Everything from the Sinclair ZX81 through the BBC Micro, past the Amiga and onto modern Macs and PCs is represented, and there is even a display charting the history of hand-held computing.

There is also an Air Traffic Control simulator including real-time data from nearby Luton Airport, and plans are afoot for a number of new galleries, including one which will contain office desk set-ups from various bygone decades. But the biggest draw for most visitors, and the one part of the museum which is open every day, is the room which houses the Colossus.

This beast of a machine is considered by many to be the first of the electronic digital machines with programmability. There were others before it, but this was the first to be digital, programmable and electronic. The machine on display is a rebuild of one of the original machines sited at Bletchley, and took over 10 years and around 6,000 man hours to finish. The computer was used to break Nazi codes during the war and was so secret that it was not included in the history of computing for many decades after the end of WW2.

Bletchley Park director Simon Greenish told us: "This is really the birthplace of the modern computer. It was here that the clever people, including famous names like Alan Turing, developed technology to automate code breaking, and that ultimately led to Colossus, which was used to find the wheel settings of the incredibly complex encoding machine the Lorenz SZ42. They didn't call it a computer in those days. It was essentially a machine to do a specific job. But it was a computer and is recognised now as the world's first."

The whole project was put together using just eight wartime photographs taken in 1945, a few fragments of circuit diagrams which had been sneakily lifted by the original project engineers despite the massive secrecy, and the help and advice of Henry Fensom, one of the men who built the computer first time around.

So there you have it. One of the most complete collections of historical computers in the world operated by a dedicated team of enthusiasts and volunteers in a beautiful country park setting. Throw in the code-breaker exhibits, a model railway, and a gallery stuffed full of wartime toys and memorabilia, and you've got a pretty good day out in our book... and all for a tenner.

Details on museum opening hours and entrance fees can be found here.

Photos: National Museum of Computing highlights