98% of the press releases that are sent to me are completely worthless. Then every once in a while I get one that’s actually kind of helpful. That was the case when earlier this week I got a press release about The National Museum of Computing.

The National Museum of Computing documents and celebrates the development of computers and computing. There is a physical museum that you can visit (if you’re near Bletchley, England). There is also a great virtual tour of the National Museum of Computing. Throughout the virtual tour you’ll find dozens of clickable hotspots to learn about the artifacts housed within the museum.

In addition to the virtual tour, museum’s website hosts some picture-based challenges about computers. Students have to spot the differences between the images of artifacts from the museum.

Applications for Education

Some of us will remember using some of the computers related products that are featured in the virtual tour of the museum. For our students, it’s an interesting history lesson about the development of technology. One of the things that some of my former students found fun to do was to try to find the original prices for old computers and convert that into inflation-adjusted prices.

By the way, the featured image in this blog post is of a Compaq laptop manufactured in 1993 that was in the repair closet in my classroom last year.