The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in the UK is always worth a visit if you want an insight into the pioneering days of computing when thermionic valves and punched tape were the order of the day. The museum shows a number of working rebuilds including the Colossus and Tunny machines used during the Second World War to decipher messages encoded by the Lorenz SZ42 machines which employed a Vernam stream cipher.

The exhibits are being continually revised so there is always something new to see; the latest rebuild due for completion at the end of the year is an EDSAC machine designed in 1947 by a team led by Maurice Wilkes. The EDSAC was the forerunner of the world’s first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) introduced in 1951.

The museum has arranged a series of Summer Bytes events taking place every afternoon in August. If you have children entering year 7 in September you are probably aware they will each be given a BBC micro:bit programmable computing board. Visitors to the museum will have a chance to get their hands on the board before its official release date and compare it with its predecessor; the BBC micro. Go to the events page and click on Summer Bytes to check out all the activities they have planned for you this summer.