
Fantastic!
Definitely taking a day off to go and visit!
A new exhibit opens today at Bletchley Park that illustrates the entire World War II codebreaking process from signal intercept to final decrypt by Tunny machines. The original Tunny, a British project to re-engineer the then-unseen German Lorenz S42 cipher machine, was developed in 1942. After tens of thousands of man-hours …
Bletchley Park is one of the most undervalued historical landmarks in Britain, nay, Western Europe. Incredible feats of both human and computer engineering were achieved there during one of the pivotal times in recent history and I find it disgraceful that parts of it continue to suffer from underfunding and lack of understanding about the Park's significance. Where's the EU funding for BP? What about some more from the Lottery Heritage fund? Surely there's some spare in the 2012 budget, we can't have frittered it all away on shuttle bus lanes and Underground extensions.
I can't stand to see how some of the Park is, quite literally, still falling apart, and I applaud the team of staff and volunteers for continuing to maintain it as best they can and preserve the immensely important site and its contents for future generations of visitors. (why is the whole site not listed as a national treasure already and fully funded by the Government?!)
I will most certainly be visiting the Park again soon to see this new exhibit, it sounds absolutely fantastic.
+1
I had the pleasure of touring BP a couple of years back and was astounded at how it had to struggle along on clearly minimal support. That place should be one of Britain's great national monuments to its scientific and engineering genius. It's a national disgrace that it's not properly recognised and funded by your gubmint.
Geniuses - all of 'em.
Nice article, but Colossos was NOT the first computer, it was a calculator. The Manchester Baby was the first computer. It's a bit like the Yanks saying that ENIAC was the first computer - ENIAC was only a calculator when it was built (programmed with plug-in cables!). Please don't wreck computing history with this sort of inaccuracy, Colossos was a fantastic machine and certainly a precursor to real computers, but it did not have re-writable memory etc etc, so it was a fabulous calculator.