Museum of Science and Industry

Work also took me to Manchester, on the way back from Newcastle, and so I stopped at the Museum of Science and Industry. Parts of the museum were closed for refurbishment at this visit, but the core collections were open.

Manchester had a key role to play in the history of computing in the United Kingdom. One of the exhibits at MoSI is a replica of Baby, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine.

In the very next gallery is a collection of cotton processing machines, including this Jacquard loom, which, as a programmable device, provides an interesting link between the other machines in this gallery and Baby.

Finally, a machine used to speed up mass communication; a Linotype, which casts complete lines of type, ready to be used in a printing press. Old lines of type are melted back into a whitemetal reservoir, which provides the raw material, in a cyclic process.