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Attack of the IT monuments men: Museum wants your kit

Come to our Reg Summer lecture to see if your legacy measures up

Reg lectures If you think a technological legacy should be more than some undocumented code, a pile of scrap tin and half a draft user manual you really should come along to El Reg’s June 24 lecture.

Kevin Murrell, co-founder of The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley (yes, that one), will be explaining why he really wants you to take care of that new mainframe that supports nearly 1000 virtual servers: “Because in ten years’ time I will be considering how best to display it in a museum.

“It might be surrounded in layers of security now,” adds Murrell, “but I need to think about the 10 year olds that will need the root password when they are reconfiguring it as part of a summer computing camp.”

Kevin will also explain how his team hunts down vintage, and near vintage, kit as well as sharing the secrets of how they return them to their full noisy, working glory and open them to the whizz-kids of the future.

“The top flight security engineers who are concerned with the UK national infrastructure now are the schoolboys we took on as volunteers ten years ago. We are currently working with the group that will become your most valued engineers in another ten years.”

The formal talk will kick off at 7pm, though the doors will be open from 5.30pm.

After 40 minutes or so of formal lecture, we’ll be having a brief, er, refreshment break, before having some no holds-barred Q&A.

So, if you care about this industry’s future, as well as its past, you’ll want to snap up one of the few remaining tickets.

Full details here. ®

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