THE National Museum of Computing has been promised one million pounds by British technology entrepreneur Matt Crotty.
It marks the largest single donation handed to the museum based at Bletchley Park, which curates, stores and repairs old computers.
The cash will be used to refurbish the venue in order to help it deal with more visitors and put extra machines on show.
To obtain the money, The National Museum of Computin (TNMOC) must also play its part as the pledge is on a matching funding basis, meaning Mr Crotty will match every future donation until a total of £1m has been reached.
Mr Crotty said: “My decision to donate has been motivated by the increasing public awareness of the significance of digital heritage and the role and understanding it can play in inspiring current and future generations to become engineers and computer scientists.”
Based in the grounds of the Bletchley Park wartime code-cracking centre, TNMOC displays a replica of the Colossus computer along with countless machines of historical importance.
The museum is also involved in a project to recreate the Edsac computer – one of the first computers to be used by businesses and members of the science community.