Opera celebrating today: Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

I was once on a business trip to Manchester, showing off our project on the Eurographics conference. A quick Googling gives that this must have been in 2001 (the project was Verse, a networking protocol for 3D graphics applications).

My colleague and friend who was presenting at the conference and I had some slack time, and being huge geeks we visited the Museum of Science and Industry. Idly walking around, we came across the "computing history" department, which prominently featured a replica of this machine, in (as as I recall) 3 or 4 full-height racks.

As we stood there contemplating the enormity and general coolness of it (it uses a freaking CRT as a kind of RAM! You can see the bits!), we were approached by a gentleman who started describing it.

As we understood it, he was one of the original developers, who had also participated in building the Museum's replica. Once he got that we were in fact working programmers, he was visibly excited and we spent quite some time there.

It was awesome, clearly one of my best tech museum experiences.

The original tweet by @opera: http://twitter.com/#!/opera/status/83119985144233985