Lots of cool memories and trip in memory lane

daugherboards that contained entire motherboards and CPUs, cool

I remember having a MB like this, also note the extra holes around the CPU to allow for bigger CPUs to fit

man, I remember all of these

The really cool part of that museum is of course the space shuttle that was moved there:

including a booster

After flying the space shuttle to LAX (through a nice flight across the california coast, I remember seeing it when it flew by the bay area), they show the challenging trip to the science center:

The rest of the museum was still fun to see, including a next expo on Ankor:

And nice gardens on the way out:

The vehicles section was fair:

Other various displays:

There was an interesting exhibit that showed how different drugs worked on the brain:

Animals:

The last floor also had interesting displays on existing and future technologies:

All in all, worth the stop

Science:

Several displays/rooms on animals and insects:

The egypt section was quite good too:

a little bit of everything

They had decent displays on encryption and Bletchley Park, but I had been to the real place :)

haha

The museum is in a former textile factory, cool to see the equipment still there:

punch tapes that controlled the machines

I didn't quite know that Bletchley Park is actually separate from the National Museum of Computing (they are adjacent, but separated by a fence, needing an annoying 10-15mn walk all the way around), and Bletchey Park actually opens earlier, so it's probably best to visit first (also check the National Museum of Computing's website for which dsays they have guided tours and guides showing the hardware (well worth it).

I'll start with the National Museum of Computing as it was the most exciting to me with its fully functional rebuild bombe and colossus decryption machines for Enigma and Lorenz (the much more secure encryption system German Command used):

One big mistake the germans did was to send a weather report starting with the same german word (known plaintext) every morning. This allowed building a computer (bombe) that tried all rotor combinations to turn the crypted message into the known platintext:

The even more impressive machine (by a lot) was the aptly named "Colossus" which was build from scratch from a reverse engineered design (that part is so impressive), to decrypt the much more secure Lorenz encryption:

the computer reads the encrypted message from this paper tape (5 bit ASCII)

this machine did the decryption once the other machine had output the decryption parameters

How lorenz was reverse engineered and cracked is complicated and super impressive, but basically all came down to the almost same message being sent twice with the same key which allowed for a known plaintext attack:

This video shows the different machines in action Bombe rebuild (to break enigma), Colossus rebuild (to break Lorenz), plus the oldest still working half-mechanical computer (Harwell Dekatron):

And the museum had lot of other computers, a collection that is close to being as good as the one at the computer history museum in Mountain View, CA:

they have a whole collection of tubes (pre-transistors) to replace the ones that break on their machines

core memory

impressive they had so many of those machines, still working

I had one of those

this too

and this too (Asmtrad CPC464+memory upgrade+floppy)

didn't have this one at home, but worked with them at SGI

those I never had, but I wish I did. Archimedes was awesome and way ahead of its time with Arm RISC CPUs

The Harwell Dekatron was also a very cool (and still working) computer I had never seen:

Bletchley Park had different buildings each with their story and what they were used for:

Lots of info on the machines, an earlier crack of older enigma machines was to use EINS for plaintext attacks:

They had many displays on the brilliant mathematicians that broke the codes and built the machines. Alan Turing was one of them, but they were multiple others:

Despite some inefficiencies in having to go back and forth between the 2 museums to join a timed tour at Bletchley (which actually is skipable if you are short on time), I spent the entire day there (open to close) and it was very well worth it.

Before leaving OKC, we went to the Museum of Osteology, which was surprisingly good:

Another nice museum in OKC was the Science Museum. It was worth a good 3H and did a good job having kid friendly and child resistant sections while having better exhibits for adults that wreen't too damaged by said kids. By US science museum standards, it was pretty good. Their small planetarium was definitely better than average:

I can't quite explain how, but Jennifer made it through the tight rope. Well done

Jennifer wasn't having any fun :)

Good times.

found a lovely little kitten

once a day during that time of the season, a train takes passengers to the mine

And that was it for Ely Nevada Northern Railway Museum, it was time to get back on the road...

When we found that out, we spent 1.5 days going through all the presentations they had during the Xmas holidays, and we saw most but not all of the static exhibits:

it is located at the back of the grand palais, an iconic building in Paris

The different presentations were definitely a highlight:

exhibits on magnetism, showing magnets lose their properties when they are too warm

more interesting: stream of liquid gas is susceptible to magnetism

supraconductive material, when cooled sufficiently will stay in a magnetic equilibrium

The museum's high power experiments (static electricity and electro magnets) have been there forever and are always a favourite:

nice generator, 330kV

go big, or go home

induced electric currents from magnetism allow for levitation, and it's hot

There were lots of other exhibit of course:

it's all about density, yes this is real water and a real bowling ball

Multiple sections on animals

the ants exhibit was cool

the queen

termites too

the octopus demo was cool too

it gets to open a jar with a crab inside

and eat the yummy crab

The 2nd day, we came at opening time to see some static exhibits before the presentations started:

We then went to see the excellent supraconductivity:

and then came the time for the full scale maglev demo

a bit of time to cool down the supraconductive magnets

and then it was Jennifer's turn:

There plenty of other presentations:

turning gas into solid

oxygen in the air liquefies first, and causes flammable liquid

safety goggles are for other people :)

they had bucket fulls of liquid gas to play with

After 1.5 days, we didn't quite get the time to see it all, but we made a good dent. The staff and demonstrator were awesome. I'm really sad that this museum will close forever in less tha na year.