User:TedColes/sandbox2

Origins
The Bletchley Park estate was threatened with demolition and redevelopment in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was saved in 1993 thanks to the efforts of the Bletchley Park Trust, which had been established in the previous year. One leading member – and secretary to the Trust – was a scientist with electronics and computer engineering skills named Tony Sale (1931–2011). He had worked for MI5 and later at the Science Museum alongside Doron Swade on a series of projects to restore some of the Science Museum's computer holdings to working order. Sale became the first curator of the Bletchley Park Museum, which in its early days was supplemented by more than a score of collections varying from WWII memorabilia to model railways. One of these centred around the history of computing and contained many historic computers, several of which were maintained in working order by enthusiastic volunteers, many of whom were members of the Computer Conservation Society.

In 1993, Tony Sale and a group of volunteers started to rebuild a Colossus (a 'rebuild' as it contains parts from an original) in Block H. By June 1996 they had a prototype machine working, which was formally switched on by the Duke of Kent in the presence of Tommy Flowers who built the wartime Colossi. When in 2004 Block H came under threat of demolition, Sale and colleagues were able to protect it by obtaining Grade II listed building status for it. This led to the detachment of the computing collection from the Bletchley Park Trust museum, and the establishment of the Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust which later became the national Museum of Computing in 2007. However, between 1994 and 2007 a group of volunteers led by John Harper built a working replica of a Bombe (used to help decipher Enigma–coded messages) in the BPT museum. This was relocated to Block H in 2018.