Bletchley Park is home to our digital heritage – it is a crying shame that the government won't fund it

In the past couple of months I've visited two of the world's leading computer history museums, and they provide a remarkable contrast. Mainly it's to do with money. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is housed in a magnificent, award-winning modern building, with a 370-seat auditorium and rooms for classes and corporate events.

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, is housed in dilapidated huts left over from the second world war.

The Computer History Museum has a fairly substantial staff that includes a "vice president of capital campaign and principal giving" and a "senior director of corporate business development". Its fundraising efforts try to exploit its proximity to local tech companies such as Google and Cisco, and local universities such as Stanford and the University of California's campus at Berkeley.

TNMOC is run by volunteers, and there are no local computer giants. While Bletchley Park is close to the Open University HQ, OU's students are rarely on campus.

In terms of things to see, however, the two are closer than you might think, especially considering that The Computer History Museum first opened in Boston in 1984. Its exhibits range from pre-computer punched card systems through a Cray supercomputer to racks of small micros, including relatively rare machines such as the MindSet. Yes, it also has a working Babbage engine built by the Science Museum in London, but it won't be there forever. It was paid for by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft, who plans to take it home.

TNMOC has a working Colossus rebuilt by Tony Sale and others, and it expects to have what may be the world's oldest original computer that still works: the Harwell/Witch (Ding dong, this Witch ain't dead, 10 September 10). It also has an air traffic control room and a new microcomputer gallery, which is excellent. You can actually use some of TNMOC's old micros, which you can't in California.

A rational government would look at TNMOC's impressive progress in only four years and chuck it a few quid. Sadly, we don't have a rational government. It seems that the history of computing is the preserve of the Science Museum, which, while it has many great merits, isn't doing the job at the moment. Of course, TNMOC is just one of the organisations based at Bletchley Park, a short walk from Bletchley station. It is also home to a reconstructed code-breaking Bombe, a Home Front exhibition, a Churchill Collection, and a model railway, among other things. It could be developed to offer much more.

But Bletchley Park needs £10m for repairs. This led almost 22,000 people to sign the Save Bletchley petition, but the polite government reply to that more or less decodes to "get stuffed". Downing Street says English Heritage gave Bletchley £330,000 for roof repairs, and Milton Keynes council will provide "a further £600,000 for critical restoration work".

Dr Sue Black, from the University of Westminster, the petition's independent organiser, might have done much better financially if she had just persuaded a couple of MPs to make Bletchley their second home.

There's really no arguing with the fact that computing has been dominated by the US, and that the giant American computer corporations can afford to subsidise the preservation of their heritage.

But important pioneering work on cryptography, code-breaking and computing was done at Bletchley Park, in the UK, and it arguably changed the course of history. It certainly shortened the war, and saved many thousands of lives. If that's not worth preserving, what is?

At this point, there is still time to rescue our digital heritage, while some of the men and women who created it are still alive, and many electronics components are still available. Ignore it for another five or 10 years, and it may well be too late.