Everything Still Switched On: The Centre for Computing History
Most computer museums are quiet rooms of dead machines behind glass. The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge is the opposite: a hall of old computers and consoles that are plugged in, warmed up and waiting for you to type, click and play. That one decision, to keep the machines alive rather than embalmed, is what makes it one of the best places in Britain to actually understand this history, and it is why a Game Boy archive feels so at home writing about it.
A hands-on history of computing
The Centre is a registered charity, founded in 2006, and its collection spans the whole story of computing, from room-sized mainframes through the home computer boom to the game consoles that grew out of it. What sets it apart is that so much of it runs. You can sit at a BBC Micro or a ZX Spectrum, pick up a controller, and experience these machines the way their owners did, rather than reading a plaque beside a switched-off box. Keeping decades of hardware working takes constant, unglamorous repair, swapping failed capacitors, coaxing dead disk drives back to life and hunting down parts that have not been manufactured in thirty years. It is exactly that effort that turns a store of old kit into a living museum.
The right city for it
There is a reason a museum like this belongs in Cambridge. The city is one of the birthplaces of the British home computer. Sinclair Research, which gave the world the ZX80, the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, was based here, and so was Acorn Computers, whose BBC Micro taught a generation to program and whose ARM processor architecture now sits inside almost every smartphone on earth. To walk through a hands-on computing museum in Cambridge is to stand a short distance from where a surprising amount of modern computing was actually invented.
Teaching, not just keeping
The Centre pairs all of this with serious education work: school groups, holiday workshops and coding clubs, using the old machines to show young people where the devices in their pockets came from. There is something powerful about teaching programming on the very computers that first made it a household activity, the BBC Micro among them. A museum that turns its collection into a classroom is doing something this archive has a lot of time for. A console, after all, is not only a thing to look back on, it is a thing to build with and learn from.
A processor you can walk around
The Centre is also home to one of the most extraordinary teaching objects in computing. The MegaProcessor, built by engineer James Newman over more than four years at a cost of over forty thousand pounds, is a working microprocessor blown up to human scale: a wall of tens of thousands of transistors and around ten thousand LEDs that light up to show the data physically moving through the machine as it runs. Newman donated it to the Centre, where it was switched on in a handover ceremony in November 2016, and it has since earned a Guinness World Record. It makes visible, in flashing light, the thing every chip hides: that a processor is really just switches turning on and off very fast. For anyone who has ever wondered what is actually happening inside a Game Boy, it is the clearest answer you can walk around.
A shared conviction
This is a single-machine archive writing about a museum that covers the whole history of computing, and the scales are very different. But the belief underneath is the same: that these machines are culture, that their history is fragile, and that the best way to honour them is to keep them switched on. Whether it is a hall of working computers in Cambridge or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work comes down to the same stubborn idea that this stuff matters and should still run.
The Centre is one of the places I have gathered in a guide to the video game museums worth visiting around the world, if you are planning a wider trip.
If you are near Cambridge, it is well worth the trip, and you can learn more or support the charity at computinghistory.org.uk. A museum you are allowed to switch on is a rare and wonderful thing.
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