I was lucky enough to be able to visit Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes last Friday ("home of the codebreakers"). It was a fascinating insight into the history of computing and really put things in to perspective about how far we have come in just 50 years. It was incredible to hear about how in the times where the feat of breaking Enigma was carried out how they were using pens and paper and mechanical devices just to get some bits of the puzzle. What truly interested me though was the museum of computing - a library of what I would consider ancient machines that the public are free to play with. I had a play with an Acorn with my fond memories from school time and had a go at some retro programming paying homage to the show "Look around you" armed with the manual placed beside the machine.

Here is the lovely program I wrote - 4 lines of code - 3 to get it up and running and 1 to execute it. And no those are not line numbers you include them in your code!


I'm not really going anywhere with this - It was just a bit of fun and something to seriously reflect on but it reminded me of the simplicity of interfaces and the simplicity of programming languages back in the day. It took me a day recently to get Eclipse setup with the right Java environment and here I had a simple program running in no more than 5 minutes from nothing.