Good news from Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park should be high up on your lists of UK sites to visit if you are interested in the history of computing or code-breaking. It was the main decoding station in WW2 for the Enigma codes used by the German military, and the site where (arguably) the world’s first programmable computer, the Colossus, was designed and used.
After the war almost all the intelligence and material from the site was removed, and it fell into disrepair. It is only in the last 10/15 years that people have become aware of the valuable and ground-breaking work that was carried out there. Bletchley Park has now recast itself as the ‘National Codes Center’, with various exhibits relating to WW2 itself, and more specifically to the role of the codebreakers.
One of their most interesting projects has been the attempt to rebuild the codebreaking machines, often from the 50 year old memories of the people who worked there, and a couple of circuit diagrams — the first rebuild project focused on Colossus, and they have now announced the completion of the work rebuilding a Bombe. These machines, originally developed by Polish mathematicians before the war, and then developed further by Alan Turing, replicated the workings of the German Enigma cipher machine, and could be used to help work out the settings used by the people who encrypted the messages the Bletchley Park codebreakers were trying to break.
I’ve been to Bletchley Park twice — both times with school groups. The second time was soon after the opening of the National Museum of Computing, which gave me the opportunity to wander around and recall some of my computing past (the BBC Micro, the Archimedes, the Psion 5…), as well as to see some working mainframes like a PDP/11 which were incredibly powerful in their day, but now probably out-gunned by my mobile phone. Both trips were a great day out — why not put it on your list of places to go over the summer?