David McManus looks at how computing nerds see the industry’s history

The world of computing is mature enough for its history to be studied. Within the grounds of Bletchley Park, famous for being the place where the Enigma code was cracked during the Second World War, lies The National Museum of Computing where classrooms of the 1980s are replicated, complete with banks of BBC Micro computers from the era.

The BBC Micro is legendary for being one of the first genuinely personal home computers and it provided the platform for many people to get started in writing software.

It was also a hobbyist’s dream due to the robustness of its build which was designed primarily for the school classroom. As well as coding, many owners would take apart their BBC Micros, fixing and swapping components as they became worn out.

But 35 years is a long time and unsurprisingly it appears the number of enthusiasts proficient in maintaining and repairing those pioneering machines has dwindled to the point where the museum is now making an open appeal for any remaining experts to come forward and help keep them alive. It is difficult to imagine that all the gadgetry we fill our lives with today might one day be worthy of a place in a museum, but they certainly will.

Complex electronic devices are so ubiquitous that they have become almost disposable and despite the false impression to the contrary, they generally don’t need repairing. As such, there are fewer of us than ever who actually understand the inner workings of a tablet computer or smartphone. There can be hardly anyone outside of specialist technicians in lab coats who would even contemplate taking the back off something and having a fiddle about inside.

The idea that a future generation will be hard pushed to revive our current hardware puts in mind an infamous incident that happened online back in 2000.

A contributor to several forums started making predictions about events that would happen in the near future, eventually outing himself as a time traveller from 2036. So far, so ‘how very Internet-y’ would be a reasonable response, but the man, who named himself John Titor, managed to gather quite a following. He said he was sent back in time by the US Army to recover an old IBM computer from 1975 that was desperately needed to debug critical software still in use in 2036 and that on his way back he had stopped off in 2000 for personal reasons.

The failure of Titor’s predictions hardly managed to dent the credibility placed on him by so many. Requests for photographs of his time machine were met with small, grainy shots of a toolbox and a sports car, suggestive of a poor man’s Back to the Future.

When he made no mention of 9/11 he suggested that his timeline was different to that being experienced by the world he had travelled back to and managed as many paradoxical get-outs as a lazy Doctor Who.

Clearly the invention of an overactive imagination, the Titor story of historical computer parts needed in the future had a plausibility to it that many nerds wanted to be true.