On 23 September 2026, the Microsoft 365 community filled Block H at The National Museum of Computing for a day of practical learning, generous conversation and friendship—surrounded by machines that changed the world.
Community is the real platform
CollabDays is a global network of free, non-profit and community-led events built around Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure and Copilot. The events are organised by local user groups, Microsoft MVPs and volunteers. There are no sales pitches at the heart of the programme—just people sharing what they have learned, meeting others who face the same challenges and helping one another become better at what they do.
Bletchley Park is one member of that worldwide family. Events in communities including Madrid, the Netherlands, Hamburg and New England each have their own local character, while sharing the same community-first spirit. You can discover forthcoming dates and find an event near you on the CollabDays events calendar.
The work behind the welcome
A day like this begins many months before the doors open. At Lightning Tools, Matt Beighton, Nicola Warburton and Brett Lonsdale worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help bring the event together—from sponsors, speakers and communications to logistics, artwork, venue planning and the many last-minute details that attendees should never have to notice.
Lightning Tools was proud to support the event as a Gold Sponsor, but our connection goes far beyond sponsorship. This is our community too, and helping to create a place where people can learn, reconnect and feel welcome matters enormously to us.
We are deeply grateful to every speaker who prepared and delivered a session, every sponsor who helped keep the event free to attend, and every community volunteer who gave up their time. We also owe a huge thank-you to the museum volunteers, whose knowledge, enthusiasm and care for these remarkable machines make the venue feel alive.
Learning among the machines that made history
The National Museum of Computing is a uniquely fitting home for conversations about today’s cloud and AI technologies. Sessions took place beside working reconstructions and original equipment that tell the story of modern computing from wartime codebreaking to the personal computer revolution.
The Heath Robinson was an early attempt to automate the breaking of the Lorenz cipher used by the German High Command. It became operational at Bletchley Park in June 1943, but keeping its two paper tapes synchronised was extremely difficult. Those limitations led Tommy Flowers to propose a radically more reliable electronic machine: Colossus. Nearby, the reconstructed Tunny machine recreates the equipment that produced the final decrypts once the Lorenz settings had been discovered.
The BBC Micro classroom tells a later but equally important story. The BBC Computer Literacy Project put computers into British schools during the 1980s and encouraged a generation to learn programming. The museum’s working classroom contains vintage BBC Micros that visitors can still use to write BASIC today—a wonderful backdrop for modern sessions about designing technology people can actually use.
WITCH: the oldest original working digital computer
Behind the speaker is the Harwell Dekatron Computer, better known as WITCH. It first ran in 1951 and was created at Harwell to automate calculations previously performed on hand calculators by human “computors”. In 1957 it moved to Wolverhampton and Staffordshire College of Technology, where its name became the Wolverhampton Instrument for the Teaching of Computation from Harwell. TNMOC volunteers restored the original machine to full working order in 2012; it is recognised as the world’s oldest original working digital computer.
Colossus: wartime codebreaking at electronic speed
Then there is Colossus, widely recognised as the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer. Designed by Tommy Flowers, the first machine was operating at Bletchley Park in February 1944. Its 2,500 valves processed encrypted teleprinter traffic at extraordinary speed to help identify the Lorenz machine’s wheel settings. Ten Colossi were in use by the end of the war.
The machine visitors see today is a working Mark II reconstruction. Tony Sale and his team began the project in 1992, rebuilding it from surviving diagrams, photographs and memories after decades of secrecy. Seeing its valves, switches and paper tape at work makes the history tangible—and makes hosting discussions about Copilot, automation and the next era of computing in the same room feel especially powerful.
Press Play for Mark
This year’s opening keynote was dedicated to our friend Mark Macrae and to the community he helped create. In 2010, Mark co-founded SharePoint Saturday UK with Tony Pounder and Brett Lonsdale. That event brought people together to share knowledge and build friendships, and it ultimately evolved into CollabDays Bletchley Park.
Mark is also a lifelong Commodore 64 and Amiga enthusiast, so celebrating him inside The National Museum of Computing felt particularly fitting. The Press Play for Mark campaign brought retro computing, memories and friendship into the keynote and throughout the day. It was a chance to recognise what Mark started, send our love to him and his family, and support the Help Keep This Brain Running fundraising campaign.
The night before: time to say thank you
On the evening before CollabDays, Lightning Tools sponsored a live band for the speaker-and-sponsor appreciation event. It gave the people who helped make the conference possible time to relax, catch up and celebrate together before the following day’s sessions began.
Thank you to everyone who attended, spoke, sponsored, organised or volunteered. Community does not happen by accident. It happens because people choose to contribute—and CollabDays Bletchley Park showed exactly what that can create.
Find your next community event at CollabDays.org, and we hope to see you at another CollabDays very soon.
