Bletchley Park opens internet exhibition

Visitors to Bletchley Park will be able to take a trip through a gallery dedicated to the technology that made the internet possible.

The exhibition, which opened today, traces the history of communications technologies, from early electronic telegraph link through circuit switching to packet-switching.

Packet-switching was developed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the 1960s and became the key building block of the internet as we know it today.

Visitors can even experience an emulation of the first demonstration packet-switching network established for NPL’s 200 users in the 1970s. It was this network which provided a clear direction to the development of the ARPANET, which led to the internet.

The exhibition is sponsored by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). It will be housed permanently at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), which has its headquarters at Bletchley Park.

Attending the gallery launch were Roger Scantlebury, Peter Wilkinson, Brain Aldous and Keith Bartlett, who worked closely with Donald Davies at The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), and were key contributors to the first NPL network, and the development of packet switching.

Kevin Murrell, a director and trustee of TNMOC said: “Now used by more than one in four of the world’s population, the internet is the phenomenon of our age and the new gallery sets out to explain the technologies that have made it possible.

“We believe that this display is the first of its type anywhere in the world.”

Examples of communications technolgies on show include the British European Airways (BEA) airline booking system of the 1960s.

Animations explain how networking operated in its infancy and the way it has evolved into the internet as it functions today.

There are also explanations of the inner workings of email, instant messaging and web browsing and a real-time feed shows the global networking pathways of users as they connect to the TNMOC website.