The Oral History Society (OHS) is not a computing museum or a dedicated technology archive, but it does host and surface high-quality work that uses Oral History methods to document British computing, and it provides the craft standards (ethics, consent, archiving) that make those recordings usable over decades - ohs.org.uk ![]()
In practice, “British computing history” appears at OHS in two main ways: featured projects and essays on the OHS site, and the long-running back-catalogue of the journal Oral History, which sometimes intersects directly with computing and technical change.
# Memory Line
OHS hosts a substantial project write-up called Memory Line: a multimedia artwork and oral history project about the early days of digital computing in Britain, built around testimonies from computing veterans and connected to the story of EDSAC and its reconstruction culture - ohs.org.uk ![]()
A useful feature of Memory Line is that it explicitly treats computing history as lived experience, including workplace culture and gendered inequalities, rather than as a simple sequence of “great men and great machines” - ohs.org.uk ![]()
# Finding computing-related material
OHS provides a Journal Search tool and an “Oral History Online” gateway that lets you discover selected articles and reviews (including themed or special issues) without treating the journal as a closed box.
One concrete example is the Spring 1983 issue listing a review item titled “Pioneers of Computing”, which is the kind of tiny clue that helps you trace how computing entered public memory and historical practice in different decades. - ohs.org.uk ![]()
# How OHS helps you do computing oral history well
If you are collecting interviews with engineers, programmers, operators, managers, and users, OHS guidance is most valuable around the parts that get people into trouble later: consent, data protection, confidentiality, copyright, archiving, and the afterlife of recordings and transcripts - ohs.org.uk ![]()
OHS also has contemporary guidance on using AI tools with oral history material, which is increasingly relevant for transcription and summarisation workflows in tech-history projects - ohs.org.uk ![]()
# Related British computing oral history archives
If your goal is to actually listen to British computing voices at scale, these sit alongside OHS as complementary collections and projects.
- Archives of IT: a large UK oral-history collection focused on IT and the tech industry - archivesit.org.uk
- Oxford Women in Computing: an oral history interview series highlighting women’s contributions in Oxford’s computing ecosystem - podcasts.ox.ac.uk
- Centre for Computing History: published oral history interviews linked to UK computing heritage and communities - computinghistory.org.uk ![]()
# See - Oral History Society. - Oral History. - History of British Computing. - EDSAC. - Women in Computing. - Computing Museums.