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Bletchley Park Visit

20 comments to Bletchley Park Visit

• Martin L

  29/01/2014 at 11:42 pm Log in to Reply

  Bletchley Park to go Themed-and-Branded?

  Unfortunately, Bletchley Park is in the news at the moment in non-too bright a light:

  BBC News Video: Bletchley Park’s bitter dispute over its future

  Elderly Bletchley Park volunteer sacked for showing Colossus exhibit to visitors

  Volunteers slam plans to turn Bletchley Park into ‘geeky Disneyland’

  The comments there suggest that the very knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteers that have made Bletchley Park what it is are now to be remoulded by actors to give a swish “1 hour” “experience” rather than the rambling tours of old of 90 minutes and (for our visits) sometimes much longer. Also to ‘go’ are such as the hall of Churchill memorabilia, local amateur radio station, and other non-glitzy associated material…

  I think that our “experience” of the place was that the volunteer enthusiasm and functional worn look of the place were very much authentically what Blatchley Park was. The non-glitzy non-museum look makes it all very real for what was done there and when and how. As for the “1 hour” “experience” mentioned: We found there was still yet more to explore after two full days of visits!

  I hope the volunteers and general opinion can save all that is very enthusiastically wartime British about the place and maintains the good will and enthusiasm of the volunteers there who are essential to bring it all alive. Paid actors hopelessly just ‘do not get it’.

  I also hope that the Churchill memorabilia and the lifelong custodian can very soon find new continued life with a welcome somewhere nearby.

  Here’s hoping that a remarkable relic of our recent past is not dumbed down to be a 1 hour dash to the trinkets shop.

  (Usual disclaimer reminder: All just my own personal viewpoint as for all commenters here!)

  ps: Good reminder to write-up and post up the pics from our last visit!… 😛

  • roadSurfer

    30/01/2014 at 9:06 am Log in to Reply

    Whilst I really enjoyed the experience, they might simply not be bringing the money in. I can understand why what we did might be “dull” to younger children who don’t understand the history or aren’t yet deeply into tech beyond playing games; and trying to engage them to bring in more people is a “good thing”(tm). Although whether the cost of paid actors (who may or may not care about the history) over volunteers (who do care) is offset by increase revenue is a good question.

    The sacking may well have been correct according to the terms of contracts, but it is bone-headed in the extreme. Bletchly attracts one set, NMC attracts another. They can then feed off each other’s slightly different capture demographics. I wonder if the Trust is upset that the NMC has that natty little computer lad wall-to-wall with old Beebs, Segas etc? Kiddy heaven.

    Reminds me, I really must get my BBC B+ down from the loft. I have the 6502 co-pro, I have the disc drive, I have *THE* disc; all I need is a compatible analog joystick and “Elite Executive Edition” here I come. Hmm…I wonder if something could be made to convert a modern USB joystick/game pad into analog signals?

    Anyway; it does sound like they want to flat-pack, portion and commoditise the park into yet another, bland “informercial” type experiences. When will the “Turing Teacups” arrive?

    • Martin L

      31/01/2014 at 7:11 pm Log in to Reply

      … Anyway; it does sound like they want to flat-pack, portion and commoditise the park into yet another, bland “informercial” type experiences. When will the “Turing Teacups” arrive?

      That sounds like the gist of the angst and especially so for how changes are being made… It would be a great shame if the sudden influx of grant money sours the working of the place rather than everyone enjoying the place being sympathetically improved for all.

      Just for one example if they are to stay faithful and sympathetic to the history of the place, there can be no “Turing Teacups” in any merchandising. There should be only the one teacup that Turing left chained to the radiator in Hut 8! 😛

      This blog posting gives a good feel for a non-techie visit to Bletchley Park by someone steeped in the period. Here’s hoping the new glitzy view doesn’t sweep all that away…

      • Martin L

        07/02/2014 at 12:46 am Log in to Reply

        Meanwhile, from my reading, the Bletchley Park Trust approach towards TNMOC and the various historic computers they hold including such as the Bombe and Colossus looks to be somewhat like bullying and sabotage:

        TNMOC: The bigger picture: fragmenting a heritage site

        The ongoing fencing off and isolation sounds very silly and even destructive towards a dedicated volunteer group. Very sad.

        Can something positive be done?

• Martin L

  07/02/2014 at 12:26 am Log in to Reply

  Blechley Park is in the news again, but for much better historic reasons this time round. In rather deadpan The Register style:

  UK spooks STILL won’t release Bletchley Park secrets 70 years on

  There’s more mysteries there yet to unfold?…

  Meanwhile, the BBC add their bit to the 70 years of Colossus celebrations at TNMOC:

  Lifting the lid on a Colossal secret

  As the code-cracking Colossus celebrates its 70th anniversary, John Cane, a former Post Office engineer who helped maintain it, reminisces for the first time about working on the pioneering machine…

  … But if little can be said about his later work, more is now being said about the key role he, and those other engineers, played in the Allied war effort. Despite this, he is modest about the significance of that task.

  “The way I looked at it was that we’d done a job, enjoyed ourselves doing it and been quite safe,” he says. “No-one was dropping bombs on us or doing anything like that.”

  “There’s pride mixed in with that naturally, but it was also a period of technical development and interest that I wouldn’t have missed for anything.”

  Indeed pioneering times. Hopefully not to be fenced off for a second time! 🙁

  • Martin L

    05/05/2014 at 8:54 pm Log in to Reply

    Evidently so for…

    There’s more mysteries there yet to unfold?…

    The story continues with:

    How GCHQ built on a colossal secret

    During World War Two, Britain led the world in its creation of machines that excelled at cracking codes used by its enemies.

    Messages scrambled using the Enigma machine were cracked by devices largely designed by maths genius Alan Turing. … Colossus was kept secret for decades after the war and it is only recently that a full picture of its influence and engineering brilliance has become apparent.

    But it was not the only code-cracking computer that Britain made. Steadily more details are emerging of the secret machines that came after Colossus and surpassed its ability to unscramble messages.

    A total of 10 Colossi were made during WW2 and once hostilities ceased eight of them were broken up and the plans for them destroyed. Two were kept and were used to help Britain’s GCHQ keep cracking codes…

    … the two Colossi, dubbed “Red” and “Blue”, were extensively modified after 1945 to make them less prone to breaking down and to make it easier to input data…

    … But GCHQ’s work on special-purpose machines did not stop with Colossus, said Mr Cane. Between the end of WW2 and the early 1960s engineers at GCHQ finished work on machines called Aquarius and Robinson whose development had started in the huts at Bletchley. They also brought into being others called Colorob, Dragon, Johnson and Oedipus…

    All very secretly pioneering to continue a secret war leading right through to the recent revelations by Edward Snowden…

• Martin L

  24/04/2014 at 10:02 pm Log in to Reply

  Is this where one notably famous person from Bletchley Park is given a whole new spin? 😉

  Pet Shop Boys premiere Alan Turing work at BBC Proms

  An orchestral work by the Pet Shop Boys about the life of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing is to have its world premiere at this year’s BBC Proms…

  He worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2, and his work helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine.

  “It is an honour for us to be invited to present some new music at the Proms and to celebrate Alan Turing 60 years after his death,” Pet Shop Boys duo Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe said in a statement.

  Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said the 40-minute work would have a key part for a narrator/actor and would tell the Turing story “but not in a strictly narrative way”. …

• Martin L

  23/09/2014 at 10:49 pm Log in to Reply

  Time rambles on in a colossal way 😛

  Museum reunion for Colossus computer veterans

  The largest gathering of veterans who operated the Colossus code-cracking computer in World War Two has been held at Bletchley Park.

  The operators met at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) which has a replica of the pioneering machine. It was held after publicity around Colossus’s 70th anniversary led many former operators to contact the museum. It has also revealed plans to create a virtual copy of the huts in which 11 Colossi were sited in wartime…

  … TNMOC trustee Tim Reynolds said the meeting was held in September to mark another 70th anniversary associated with Colossus – the opening of the first hut, called Block H, built to house the machines.

  “It was the world’s first data centre,” he said.

  At the reunion, TNMOC staff also talked about work it had done to create a virtual version of the two buildings that housed the Colossi – Block H and F – to give people a better idea of what it was like to be an operator during wartime.

  Staff and volunteers from TNMOC have used a free tool called OpenSim to build a rough prototype that lets people take a virtual stroll through the huts…

  Only thing is: How long before the dust settles around the now “next door” to TNMOC? 😐

  Who’s on for a Christmas visit?… 🙂

• Martin L

  08/10/2014 at 3:06 pm Log in to Reply

  TNMOC stay positively in the news (whilst the ‘separated’ Bletchley Park stay in the shadows?):

  Official: Turing’s Bombe BETTER than a Concorde plane

  At least according to Blighty’s mechanical engineers

  Alan Turing’s code-breaking Bombe machine has been voted engineers’ favourite artefact, beating out other engineering triumphs such as the Concorde plane and HMS Belfast.

  The Institution of Mechanical Engineers voted Turing’s World War II innovation as their favourite recipient of the Engineering Heritage Award…

  … The Bombe machine, the cryptanalytical machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman during WWII to help crack the settings of Germany’s Enigma enciphering machine, won 19 per cent of the vote, closely followed by the Concorde, which was the favourite with 17 per cent of engineers…

  … “These machines, which each weighed about a ton, illustrate the genius of Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, but also the vision and ingenuity of the engineer Harold Keen, who made these concepts a reality. “The award was presented to the replica Bombe in 2009 on behalf of Turing, Welchman and Keen and also in recognition of the fantastic work of enthusiasts who rebuilt the Bombe with such care and passion.”…

  Couldn’t agree more!

• Martin L

  01/11/2014 at 9:39 pm Log in to Reply

  Going vintage and retro in a slightly different and more recent world than the war compute engines at TNMOC, and more artistically arranged than the games room they have there… We now have our very own here in Nottingham:

  Nottingham to open ‘cultural’ centre for videogames

  A new centre dedicated to the heritage and culture of gaming in the UK is to open its doors next year.

  The £2.5m National Videogame Arcade will open to the public in Nottingham in March and will include an exhibition of old consoles and controllers.

  The centre, set over five floors, will include galleries with themed and interactive exhibitions and a games-making education area. The museum’s developer GameCity said it would celebrate gaming history.

  Director Iain Simons said: “We believe that games should be played by everyone, and that games should be made by everyone.”…

  Game on! 🙂

  • Martin L

    08/11/2014 at 8:18 pm Log in to Reply

    Drifting OT a little, there is now also a multitude of little gems from days-gone-by now available to be cyber-browsed, detailed here in true The Register enthusiasm 🙂

    Brighten your November morning: 900 in-browser arcade classics added to the Internet Archive

    Productivity nosedive predicted

    For all the conflict between console gamers and their PC brethren, kids today have never had it so good.

    In our day we had to gather in darkened shops to play video games housed in wooden cabinets that mercilessly gobbled quarters. This archaic form of gaming is almost lost to humanity, but…

    … you can today thank the Internet Archive for making 900 antique computer games conveniently playable within your web browser.

    The titles in the Internet Arcade date from the late 1970s to the early 1990s…

    … The games are run using the JavaScript MESS emulator that executes the titles’ original code within the browser (Firefox works best, Scott said)…

    Game on! 😛

• Martin L

  03/02/2015 at 11:47 pm Log in to Reply

  TNMOC rebuild yet another historic computing gem that is still attracting original parts from far flung places years later:

  Lost chunk of pioneering Edsac computer found

  An original part of one of the UK’s pioneering computers has been found in the US.

  The part is a significant chunk of Edsac – a machine built at Cambridge in the late 1940s to serve scientists at the university. It came to light because of publicity surrounding an effort to rebuild the computer. The part has now been donated to the rebuild project and will be incorporated into the finished machine.

  Edsac, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, ran its first programs in May 1949 and through its working life aided many scientists…

   

  And here’s the earlier teasers to see what latest vintage has been recrafted to return to electronic life:

  Museum switches on historic computer

  A project to recreate one of Britain’s pioneering computers has reached a key milestone.

  The first recreated parts of the re-built Edsac machine have been switched on at The National Museum of Computing. The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator first ran in 1949 and was created to serve scientists at Cambridge University…

   

  UK computing museum starts reboot of 65-year-old EDSAC

  … As The Reg has previously detailed, EDSAC has a distinguished place in computing history because its design influenced that of LEO, a British business computing effort that was probably superior to IBM’s S/360.

  EDSAC’s initial tasks were assisting scientists, a role it fulfilled well enough that the Museum says it assisted in the winning of at least one Nobel Prize.

  The machine was, of course, laughable by today’s standards. EDSAC ran at 500kHz, could process 650 instructions a second and boasted two whole kilobytes of RAM. Mercury delay lines served as memory…

   

  Hermann Hauser opens EDSAC display at National Museum of Computing
  

  Hermann Hauser has officially opened the EDSAC display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.

  As key parts of the reconstruction of one the most influential computers ever built were commissioned, the sights, sounds, heat and sheer size of computing in the late 1940s were brought to life. …

  EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was originally built at Cambridge University immediately after the Second World War by a team led by Sir Maurice Wilkes. It was the first practical general-purpose computer and marked the beginning of computer programming as a distinct profession…

  … Doron Swade, co-founder of the Computer Conservation Society and a hands-on pioneer of computer restoration, said: “This is truly a remarkable project that brings history to life for its participants and for the viewing public. EDSAC provided, for the first time, reliable computing capability for scientists…

   

  Indeed historic stuff!

  Next visit? 😉

• Martin L

  24/02/2015 at 12:05 am Log in to Reply

  Separately, Bletchley Park and the machines at TNMOC shine in the news and also on our old paper mail:

  The Bletchley Girls and The Debs of Bletchley Park – review

  The dashed hopes and the (sometimes) awful men … an insight into the lives and loves of the female codebreakers – and those with less glamorous jobs

  Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines,” Alan Turing says to Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game. This is the appeal of the Bletchley Park war. It’s a particularly British story, whose eccentric heroes are more likely to be found solving crossword puzzles than flying aeroplanes…

  … Although there were just 186 staff at Bletchley in August 1939, by 1942 there were 1,600 and by the end of 1944 this had risen to 8,743. Three-quarters of them were women, made available by the introduction of female conscription in 1941. Their stories have been neglected, largely because the exploits of the leading Bletchley code-breakers are more exciting. The women who have found their way into the histories have tended to be the handful of female cryptanalysts. Joan Clarke has now been given spirited if pouting form by Keira Knightley.

  Two books have appeared to remedy this situation…

   

  Royal Mail’s Colossus move gets ex-WREN’s stamp of approval

  Once muzzled by officialdom, former operators of Colossus have reacted well to a Royal Mail stamp marking the achievements of the computing beast and its designer, Tommy Flowers.

  The Colossus stamp is part of eight in the Royal Mail’s series, called Inventive Britain.

  The world’s first electronic, programmable computer, Colossus was dedicated to a single task…

  … At the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), home of today’s Colossus rebuild, those women are now thrilled. At the time, Bletchley was smothered by the Official Secrets Act, and people weren’t allowed to tell each other about their work, let alone the outside world…

   

  Turing family hand in petition at Downing Street

  The family of Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing – who was played on the big screen by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game – have been at Downing Street today to demand the Government pardons 49,000 other men persecuted for their homosexuality…

   

  Times change and hopefully we crack on to better ways…

• Martin L

  06/08/2015 at 12:22 pm Log in to Reply

  Beyond Bletchley

  After the war was done, and the Bletchley huts were emptied, the cogs of cryptography continued to turn under the shroud of Cold War secrecy:

  How NSA and GCHQ spied on the Cold War world

  … The story of the German Enigma machine is well-known – a device built to provide secure communications but which British code-breakers managed to crack at Bletchley Park.

  But there is another story – not fully told until now – about what came after.

  The demand for machines like Enigma grew after the end of the World War Two. And one private company led the way in meeting that demand…

  … it seems the detailed knowledge of the machines and their operations may have allowed code-breakers to cut the time needed to decrypt messages from the impossible to the possible.

  The relationship also involved not selling machines such as the CX-52, a more advanced version of the C-52 – to certain countries. “The reason that CX-52 is so terrifying is because it can be customised,” says Prof Richard Aldrich, of the University of Warwick. “So it’s a bit like defeating Enigma and then moving to the next country and then you’ve got to defeat Enigma again and again and again.”

  Some countries – including Egypt and India – were not told of the more advanced models and so bought those easier for the US and UK to break…

  And what now in our ever more electronic highly connected age?…

• Martin L

  13/07/2017 at 4:07 pm Log in to Reply

  There’s still secrets to be found and told:

  €100 ‘typewriter’ turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine

  1941 German army crypto machine found in Romanian flea market

  … Enigma machines were sent to Romania as a German ally, until it switched sides to the Allies in 1944, so Reuters speculates that there may be still others undiscovered in the country.

  In Blighty, Enigma is forever bound with the names of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, Turing as the best-known boffin of the crypto-cracking farm to help win World War 2 (and incidentally helping to kick-start the computing age)…

   

  Still something to watch out for…

• Martin L

  04/10/2017 at 7:22 pm Log in to Reply

  TNMOC grabs the good headlines again:

  World’s first dedicated computer centre declared ‘irreplaceable’ by Historic England

  This is not just a hut. This is an original [Colossal] Bletchley Park hut…

  El Reg may have overstretched themselves a little with confusing electrical H-bridges (and the Wheatstone bridge) with an old kitsch Aussie soap, but hey! All news like this is good news! 🙂

  As always, there’s some good comment from the El Reg commentards…

  One to be soon revisited!! 😉 😉

• Martin L

  20/09/2018 at 12:44 pm Log in to Reply

  TNMOC continues to move onwards! (They got their Bombe back!! 🙂 )

  National Museum of Computing to hold live Enigma code-breaking demo with a Bombe

  Turing-Welchman machine to do its thing – with original wartime operator present

  The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is going to fire up its replica Enigma code-breaker to decrypt encoded messages sent from Poland – with an original wartime Bombe operator supervising the process.

  The British museum’s Bombe replica, recently moved into the original Block H building that housed the wartime Bombes, is a fully functional reproduction of the machines that broke Nazi Germany’s Enigma ciphers during the Second World War.

  … As part of the World Computer Congress being held in Poland this Friday (21 September), the Bombe will be fired up … While the machine does its work (this is 1940s technology, remember), participants in the conference will hear papers about cryptography, the Bombe and master codebreaker Alan Turing, who, along with Gordon Welchman, was one of the leading minds behind the creation of the original Bombes.

  Ruth Bourne, a wartime Bombe operator, will be present at TNMOC on the day to verify the process…

  … Interested folk can watch the challenge live from around 0830 BST on Friday [21/09/2018] on the World Computing Congress website.

  As usual, good comment from the El Reg commentards…

  And very good to hear and see. To be revisited! 🙂 🙂

• Martin L

  08/02/2019 at 6:00 pm Log in to Reply

  After far too long… Finally a little bit more of the Bletchley Park story and achievements go on display at The National Museum of Computing:

  Original WWII German message decrypts to go on display at National Museum of Computing

  Colossal intercepts are just the Bombe

  Bletchley Park’s National Museum of Computing will be exhibiting original, freshly discovered decrypted WWII messages to coincide with the 75th anniversary of D-Day this June – messages that were broken by the Colossus machines based on the museum’s site. The decrypts are due to be put on display in The National Museum of Computing’s (TNMOC) Colossus gallery, which houses the world’s only working replica of the Colossus code-breaking computer.

  Colossus itself remained a state secret for 30 years after the war ended because the British government didn’t want anyone to know just how advanced its code-breakers were…

  Good to see TNMOC are developing further regardless of their neighbour!

• Martin L

  07/03/2019 at 4:41 pm Log in to Reply

  TNMOC adds some very UK historic multi-million pounds randomness to its live collections:

  UK’s beloved RNGesus machine ERNIE goes quantum in 5th iteration

  El Reg takes a trip to TNMoC to swot up on the tech history of Premium Bonds

  For computing history nerds, the names Tommy Flowers and Harry Fensom likely conjure up images of the code-breaking Colossus. But after the war, they also had a hand in creating a dearly loved, much-anthropomorphised, millionaire-making machine: ERNIE.

  ERNIE – Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment – is the machine used to crank out millions of random numbers when the Post Office, and now NS&I, selects the winning Premium Bonds each month…

  … ERNIE has never failed…

  … And that principle remained the same up until now – today’s announcement is a step-change… The quantum leap means ERNIE 5 takes 12 minutes to do the draw – which future-proofs the draw for NS&I, allowing it to keep selling Premium Bonds for who knows how long. If ERNIE 1 was still around today, it would take about 190 days with the machine running non-stop…

  … in about 2005, when Hayes found out that ERNIE 1 still existed – languishing in the Science Museum’s storage – he set about trying to bring ERNIE 1 to TNMoC…

  ERNIE 1 is a first of a kind with a wildly random mix of first-of-kind new tech of the day. And so there they have it! Or rather, a no less impressive original demo system used to demonstrate that ERNIE 1 worked. And so do we see when it is revealed to the public this summer (2019)…

  See also on YouTube: The origins of ERNIE – with Phil Hayes, from The National Museum of Computing

  For our next random visit?! 😉

• Martin L

  30/10/2019 at 4:49 pm Log in to Reply

  For a new development at Bletchley Park itself:

  Plans for £26M Tech Institute at Bletchley Park

  Plans have been submitted to develop part of Bletchley Park into a technology school for 1,000 students.

  Milton Keynes College is seeking council approval for the £26m development of listed buildings at the codebreaking site in Buckinghamshire.

  It hopes to transform the Block D buildings into spaces for seminars, events, student support and a cafe. The application claims the Institute of Technology would “provide much needed education facilities” to the area…

   

  Here’s hoping that is all done in keeping with the site. However, compared to the original tidy-up of those old historic buildings and IIRC promises of renovating them to the glory of their wartime past, to my personal humble opinion this sounds like a sell-out (and a sell-off?)… Note that a large part of the Bletchley Park site has long ago been lost to a housing estate…

  Also, this latest proposal looks to be a repeat of an earlier bid from 2018: Plans for Digital Technology Institute at Bletchley Park

  … A bid for £18m of government funding has been submitted by Milton Keynes College and businesses, including Microsoft and KMPG…

  Continued curious times in Bletchley Park?

  Meanwhile, I hope that TNMoC across the other side of the Bletchley Park fence can gain some technical interest from the students and their college?…