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You have to have the place be self sustaining and provide something for everyone.

The very brief BBC broadcast on the 6 Oâ(TM)Clock News on the 24th January created an impression of disharmony within Bletchley Park.

The piece drew attention to three very different and separate issues;

The alleged treatment of volunteer guides
Private Collections being asked to leave the site
The access arrangements to The National Museum of Computing

In order to manage increasing numbers of visitors, and to make it more accessible and family friendly, the guided tour was reduced from 90 minutes plus to an hour. This revised tour was developed and implemented by a working group of staff and volunteers, and the great majority of our volunteers have embraced and supported the revised tours for nearly a year. Sadly, there was one exception where a tour guide who was unwilling to conduct tours in the agreed format has been asked to stand down from this role.

Some of the non-core private collections which have in recent years operated from the Bletchley Park site have been asked to relocate, as the parts of the site they occupy are to be restored to their wartime appearance and made available to help tell the remarkable story of WW2 Codebreaking. These buildings of high historic value, are artefacts in their own right and deserve to be interpreted accordingly, to reflect their importance and the profound impact of the work that took place inside them.

The National Museum of Computing was formed in 2006 and is run by a separate charitable trust. It willingly entered into a lease agreement with the Bletchley Park Trust to rent Block H on the Bletchley Park site to house its museum. This museum remains on-site and accessible, by way of a separate admission charge, to anyone visiting Bletchley Park. It is the Bletchley Park Trust's policy to have a solid working relationship with The National Museum of Computing and we intend that its exhibition should be enjoyed by visitors to Bletchley Park>p>Bletchley Park. The site is in the middle of a major, and much needed, £8 million Heritage Lottery Funded restoration project to bring the many historic buildings on the site back to a state of good repair and create an inspiring experience for its ever-increasing numbers of visitors. This will create a world class museum and heritage site which is a fitting memorial to the heroic codebreakers of Bletchley Park making the site much more sustainable and accessible to growing numbers of visitors.

Progress in Perspective

They have a contact page available at http://www.bletchleypark.org.u... - tell them what you think yourself

From Bletchley Park http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/view_product.rhtm/133066/238531/detail.html

£119.99

Enables you to build your very own battery powered Electronic Enigma machine. Does NOT include wooden case. Requires only basic soldering experience. Extensive easy to read 60+ page manual.

First, this is first such geek driven museum I know.

Here you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Science_museums . You can find my workplace, in a sub-sub category, and I work with staff from many other institutions, and most are very "geek" driven.

Picking one out, Bletchley Park has been mentioned on /. before, and has some support from Google among others.

Their website, frankly said, visually sucks. Those YellowHawk people are doing themselves a disservice.

They don't seem to have a design document done for consistent use of their logo, nor for consistency among visual elements on the pages. There are tons of annoyances, they didn't even do the most trivial things like color correction on the B/W pictures (say on the history page). I don't claim to be any sort of a highfalutin' designer, but there's a point where things just get too annoying to look at, and all the minor problems add up...

It is a shame that on their site there is nothing about polish "coders" who in 1932 broke the enigma code and made it available for British and French intelligence...

You didn't look very hard. http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/polish.rhtm

It is a shame that on their site there is nothing about polish "coders" who in 1932 broke the enigma code and made it available for British and French intelligence

They have a detailed page about Polish contributions here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/polish.rhtm

If there's one place you should visit when you're in the UK, it's Bletchley Park.
Seeing the Colossus and their other rebuilt equipment in action is fabulous, and even better, some of the tour guides are the same guys who rebuilt these machines. More knowledgeable than that they don't come.

Bletchley Park is getting more attention in recent years. I've been there, but before the restored Colossus or replica bombe was working. All we saw were static exhibits, plus a working Enigma, something I'd seen before. There were few visitors.

Now they have funding from the UK national lottery, "Family Fun Wednesdays", a conference center, a giant chessboard, a model railway (with a "Thomas the Tank Engine layout), a mini cinema, an auto museum, model boats, and swans in the lake.

Can thoroughly recommend a visit to http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ which also houses The National Museum of Computing http://www.tnmoc.org/ Of the codes generated by the 12 different ENIGMA-type machines used by the Germans, 2 were never broken. And finally, the museum is used as an intreresting location for corporate events and weddings.

That's unfortunate. I've been a couple of times, and had a knowledgeable guide each time.
In winter, they have a small staff on weekdays, so not everything is open and you may get a dull guide. Weekends are better. Or go during the summer.

Check the BP website for details.

Alan Turing committed suicide. He was not assassinated by Men In Black.

Bletchley Park is not a front organisation for The Nasty Government.

There is also an Enigma Machine at the museum of science and industry in Chicago right next to the sub, I don't know of any other displays off the top of my head that could by at a museum solely dedicated to cryptography.

In the UK there's Bletchley Park

In Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, there's a scene early in the book where the Allies are assembling the personnel for Station X (aka Bletchely Park). Statistician, turned Nazi codebreaker Lawrence Waterhouse, points out that his Nazi counterpart Rudy von Hacklheber, would notice something was amiss with the Allied personnel changes based the statistics of people being transfered to Bletchely Park, and then quickly deduce that the Allies are attempting to break the Enigma code. To camouflage the transfers, Waterhouse suggests creating ficticious personnel and have some of them transfered to Bletchely Park as well. However the military can't just make any random fake person, the fictious people must be statisitically drawn from a distribution that when added to distribution of real Bletchely Park personnel, the combined distribution is statistically insignificant (i.e. fail to reject the null hypothesis) than any other large military base.

If Research 2000 did what is suggested, they failed to taint the polls with the right kind of fake data, just like what the novel warned about.

In Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, there's a scene early in the book where the Allies are assembling the personnel for Station X (aka Bletchely Park). Statistician, turned Nazi codebreaker Lawrence Waterhouse, points out that his Nazi counterpart Rudy von Hacklheber, would notice something was amiss with the Allied personnel changes based the statistics of people being transfered to Bletchely Park, and then quickly deduce that the Allies are attempting to break the Enigma code. To camouflage the transfers, Waterhouse suggests creating ficticious personnel and have some of them transfered to Bletchely Park as well. However the military can't just make any random fake person, the fictious people must be statisitically drawn from a distribution that when added to distribution of real Bletchely Park personnel, the combined distribution is statistically insignificant (i.e. fail to reject the null hypothesis) than any other large military base.

If Research 2000 did what is suggested, they failed to taint the polls with the right kind of fake data, just like what the novel warned about.

Is Bletchley Park easy to get to from London using public transport?

I haven't been (yet), but the website says it is. There seems to be a train every 15 minutes (check times and fares here) and the museum/park is opposite the station.

If you book longer-distance train journeys in advance you save loads of money, but you do have to take the specific train you booked. (e.g. a standard one-way ticket from London to Sheffield (170mi, 2hrs) is £20, book in advance and you've a good chance of paying just £5).

I would mention Bletchley Park, a mecca for geeks, particularly with their computer collection as well as the less usual cryptography collection. They have kit not just from WW2 but also from the cold war including from Warsaw Pact countries. It is essentially a day trip from London by Rail. When I was there they did a demo run of the Colossus replica - quite impressive and presented by Tony Sale, who led the reconstruction effort and is very knowledgeable. Oh, and he used to work as a technical officer for MI5 and is quite happy to talk about the relative merits of parallel processing with vacuum tube computers against Java on a modern PC. I don't know how things are now, but it is probably better to get on a tour as some of the bits weren't that well labeled when I was there.

As a genral point, book your rail tickets in advance. the further in advance you book your tickets (you can do it from outside the UK), the cheaper they will be.

* Get yourself an Oyster Card - you can get one from the tube stations at Heathrow Airport and are valid on most public transport in London including all Underground (tube) trains, all local (red) buses in London, some "overground" (i.e. not tube) trains (from 2nd Jan 2010 almost all trains in London will take it) and some river-boat services (the river boats are not cheap but can be a great way to see the sights along the river). You have to pay a £3 deposit plus whatever credit you'll want to start with, but you can get that back plus any unused credit by surrending the card at a tube station when you leave.

* If you're flying into Heathrow and you don't have too much luggage, then the tube to central London is by far the cheapest option. There are also two "overground" rail services, the non-stop Heathrow Express (15 mins to central London) and the stops-at-local-stations Heathrow Connect (25 mins to central London). Both are rather more expensive than the tube, the Express especially so, and neither take Oyster. There used to be an Airbus services from Heathrow to central London but that stopped a few years ago. National Express run some coach (long distance bus) services to/from central London that call at Heathrow but they will be the slowest option and you may need to book your tickets in advance.

* If flying in to Gatwick, then your best choice is rail to London. There are two services: Gatwick Express is a bit more expensive but faster and has more luggage space. Southern is likely to be a bit cheaper and not quite as fast. Be aware that although the two services are run by the same company, tickets on one may not be valid on the other. Neither will take Oyster as Gatwick is well outside the city boundary of Greater London. In the unlikey event you fly into Stansted (which doesn't have many flights to/from North America) then the same applies to the Stansted Express rail link. There are cheapish coach links from Gatwick and Stansted but they will be a lot slower.

* Wherever you fly into, DON'T take a taxi into London unless you really need to and have LOTS of money! Having said that, if you're not sure how to get to a particular place, London cabbies have to spend several years learning "The Knowledge" and will always be able to get you to where you want to go, for a price.

* I second the motion to go to Bletchley Park. This is outside of London but only about 45 minutes from Euston railway terminus by train. It is an absolute must see for any geek: not only does it have working replicas of the Turing "Bombe" and Colossus machines, but it has subsidiary museums on site of computing and other technology.

* Amberley Chalk Pits museum in Sussex might be of interest to you too, with displays of agricultural and industrial technology, transport and communications (TV and radio museums). It's about an hour and a half from Victoria railway terminus.

* If you're interested in transport, then the London Transport museum at Covent Garden in the centre of London is a must see.

* If you do travel outside of London by train, then unless you're going long distance (more than a couple of hours from London) you won't need t

* Get yourself an Oyster Card - you can get one from the tube stations at Heathrow Airport and are valid on most public transport in London including all Underground (tube) trains, all local (red) buses in London, some "overground" (i.e. not tube) trains (from 2nd Jan 2010 almost all trains in London will take it) and some river-boat services (the river boats are not cheap but can be a great way to see the sights along the river). You have to pay a £3 deposit plus whatever credit you'll want to start with, but you can get that back plus any unused credit by surrending the card at a tube station when you leave.

* If you're flying into Heathrow and you don't have too much luggage, then the tube to central London is by far the cheapest option. There are also two "overground" rail services, the non-stop Heathrow Express (15 mins to central London) and the stops-at-local-stations Heathrow Connect (25 mins to central London). Both are rather more expensive than the tube, the Express especially so, and neither take Oyster. There used to be an Airbus services from Heathrow to central London but that stopped a few years ago. National Express run some coach (long distance bus) services to/from central London that call at Heathrow but they will be the slowest option and you may need to book your tickets in advance.

* If flying in to Gatwick, then your best choice is rail to London. There are two services: Gatwick Express is a bit more expensive but faster and has more luggage space. Southern is likely to be a bit cheaper and not quite as fast. Be aware that although the two services are run by the same company, tickets on one may not be valid on the other. Neither will take Oyster as Gatwick is well outside the city boundary of Greater London. In the unlikey event you fly into Stansted (which doesn't have many flights to/from North America) then the same applies to the Stansted Express rail link. There are cheapish coach links from Gatwick and Stansted but they will be a lot slower.

* Wherever you fly into, DON'T take a taxi into London unless you really need to and have LOTS of money! Having said that, if you're not sure how to get to a particular place, London cabbies have to spend several years learning "The Knowledge" and will always be able to get you to where you want to go, for a price.

* I second the motion to go to Bletchley Park. This is outside of London but only about 45 minutes from Euston railway terminus by train. It is an absolute must see for any geek: not only does it have working replicas of the Turing "Bombe" and Colossus machines, but it has subsidiary museums on site of computing and other technology.

* Amberley Chalk Pits museum in Sussex might be of interest to you too, with displays of agricultural and industrial technology, transport and communications (TV and radio museums). It's about an hour and a half from Victoria railway terminus.

* If you're interested in transport, then the London Transport museum at Covent Garden in the centre of London is a must see.

* If you do travel outside of London by train, then unless you're going long distance (more than a couple of hours from London) you won't need t

Yes, all great recommendations, especially the Science Museum. The seats in the London Eye have RJ45 connectors under them, but none of us had a laptop when we went -- maybe another reason to bring your laptop?

Because of the way London has grown, with different population centres all growing and merging, it doesn't really have one centre but many, so it's worth planning a bit and doing things that are close together each day, rather than spending too long travelling from place to place. I'd allow an hour to get from The Science Museum to The Tate Modern, so they're probably best for different days. I'd also recommend the free lunchtime jazz and classical concerts at the Royal Festival Hall (close to The London Eye) and I rather like the bohemian Camden Markets (not very close to any of the other places mentioned). None of that is very geeky, though, is it? If you want a day out of London, the Bletchley Park Museum is within easy reach for a day trip and needs support, but I've never been there since it's been a museum so I don't know how good it is (I trained there in the 1970s) and there's not much else to do in Bletchley!

Take your laptop. Make sure your hotel has WiFi. Use the WiFi without changing the settings and without fear; the US uses a couple of extra radio frequencies that the UK doesn't, but since all the access points / routers will be British, your laptop will only lock on to the British frequencies, so it isn't a real issue. You absolutely will not get hassle for this.

Forget internet kiosks. They're as crappy in the UK as they are everywhere else in the world. Even being quaintly retro-fitted into a traditional red phone box with an innovative stainless steel vandal-proof trackball doesn't detract from the universal crappiness of internet kiosks in general. If you absolutely must, use a proper Internet cafe, but even so you'll be better off with your own laptop and free WiFi at a normal cafe. Lots and lots of cafes offer free WiFi. You can also get pay-for WiFi at many pubs, and those which are part of the British Telecom BT Openzone network will allow you to carry over WiFi credit from pub to another pub.

Take only one British plug adaptor (you can buy them at the airport) but take a multi-way gang lead. That way you can plug multiple American electronic devices into one British socket. Hotels the world over have a shortage of sockets, this is no different in the UK, so make the most of one socket rather than buying converters for several.

Make sure your cell phone is compatible with GSM/3G/UTMS and that your cellular provider is aware that you are travelling to the UK.

The British Museum is pretty good, albiet small, and offers a lot which American museums don't. Bear in mind that the Rosetta Stone is not as large as you might imagine. The Science Museum covers pretty much the same things as other science museums in other capital cities around the world, it's good but not particularly different from what you have back in the US, unless you desperately, desperately want to see a working version of Babbage's 250-year-old mechanical computer. If you want a second museum day, consider the Victoria and Albert museum which has lots of steampunk and design things.

If you have only one day out of London, visit Bletchley Park, the WWII codebreaking base with lots of old computers. You can catch a train from Euston station, takes about 45 mins. If you have a second day out, visit Oxford, the quaint picturesque university city with Cotswold stone buildings and lots of really distinctive museums. You can catch a train from Paddington station, takes about an hour. Neither Bletchley nor Oxford train station are in the middle of where you want to be (it's difficult to plan infrastructure in towns built a thousand years ago), so expect some walking.

Absolutely do not hire a car. Firstly, the steering wheel and handbrake will be on the wrong side of the car, secondly it's expensive, thirdly the roads are significantly more crowded and more wiggly than you are used to, and fourthly we have lots and lots of roundabouts which are entirely different to four-way stops in ways which you can probably not even imagine.

Taxis are expensive. Use the plentiful and frequent underground (subway train) service, buy an all-day or all-week pass. This pass will also cover you for the busses.

Get the London Popout Map. This covers the main pedestrian areas, underground map and bus routes in a very compact form, slips easily into a small pocket and uses a very geeky, very neat origami folding method which means you can quickly and discretely open it in a confined space, without looking like a potential mugging victim.

Get an Underground Overground tube map. You can buy these from dispensers on the underground platforms. They show the actual physical route and actual physical distances the tube trains take; the traditional symbolic map doesn't demonstrate the real distances between stops. You

If you're doing geeks on tour, consider going to Bletchley Park

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

It would be a daytrip on the train from London (it is easy walking distance (5mins?) from Bletchley Park train station

peter xyz

Bletchley Park is well worth a visit for some codebreaking + early computing. ~45 minute train journey from Euston.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

If you go to Bletchley Park the tour guides (some of whom served there during the war) are very clear about crediting all contributions where due.

One of the places the tour stops at is the memorial to the Polish code breakers and the tour guides clearly explain the Polish connection. They have an annual Polish day at the Park - celebrated two weeks ago, photos here. Bletchley Park folks recognise the Polish contribution and make their visitors aware of this.

I've been there a few times.

Ditto, from over 500 miles away. (OK, the parents live only 40 miles away, so it's not really that extreme a trip [G].)

If I had spare time I would volunteer my time and IT expertise FOC.

Put your money where your mouth is - sign up as a "Friend of Bletchley Park", which provides them with a steady income stream (your subscription, plus whatever you decide on as a regular commitment - I'm in for GBP20/year), another body to include in the count when they say to government (and other) funding bodies that "we have so-many supporters, in addition to so-many-else visitors per year", and provides you with a moderately interesting magazine and a nice warm feeling in the electrons of your main processor (or your coolant/ nutrient pump, if that's what makes you tick).

What - you're still hesitating? Which part of

"If I had spare time I would volunteer my time and IT expertise FOC."

did you actually mean? Or did you only intend to contribute time, and not something of tangible utility?

BTW - when I offered them my PDP-11, including delivery from over 500 miles away - they weren't interested. "Got 5 already, mate" was the gist of the response. Oh well, it's living with a nerd in Stirling now, TTBOMK.

And they also need to pay for:

6) Over half a million pounds for the National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/571874

An announcement from March 2009. The funding came via a government body called English Heritage whose remit is to fund historical monuments and heritage centres.

The story here is that the government refused to provide funding on the basis that they were already providing funding.

They have a working reconstruction of the Colossus at the Bletchley Park museum:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/visit/attractions.rhtm

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Here is a Mac they had in the 8-bit room:
http://www.matthewgrove.co.uk/personal/moblog/view/2008-11-15/resized_15112008531.jpg

I went a few weeks ago. The old computers are very cool, they don't have a lot of cash for fancy displays and so on, so you wander through something resembling a warehouse full of old *nix machines, ranks of huge disk drives more closely resembling a lauderette than a storage array, a room full of old personal computers you can have a go on and relive you youth - Commodore Pet, C64, Spectrum, BBC Micro, TRS-80, Amiga 500, Atari ST and more. Cases full of old PDAs, laptops and calculators. Awesome stuff for hardware geeks.

It's a truly historic place and they have some wonderful stuff they could display, but the lack of cash is obvious from the moment you walk through the doors. It is literally falling down in many places, with priceless an unique artifacts hidden away in huts thrown up 60 years ago and intended to last for 10. It's sad to see things like a Harier jet sinking in to the grass, a huge wooden mockup of a sumbarine rotting away in the car park and a dusty PDP/11 tucked away in a side room. They could have far more on display, preserve things much better and generally give the place, people and things the attention and respect they deserve if only they had the money. There is no shortage of will, knowledge or dedication, only cash. If you're ever in the UK, go. If you aren't, give them a donation.

I went a few weeks ago. The old computers are very cool, they don't have a lot of cash for fancy displays and so on, so you wander through something resembling a warehouse full of old *nix machines, ranks of huge disk drives more closely resembling a lauderette than a storage array, a room full of old personal computers you can have a go on and relive you youth - Commodore Pet, C64, Spectrum, BBC Micro, TRS-80, Amiga 500, Atari ST and more. Cases full of old PDAs, laptops and calculators. Awesome stuff for hardware geeks.

It's a truly historic place and they have some wonderful stuff they could display, but the lack of cash is obvious from the moment you walk through the doors. It is literally falling down in many places, with priceless an unique artifacts hidden away in huts thrown up 60 years ago and intended to last for 10. It's sad to see things like a Harier jet sinking in to the grass, a huge wooden mockup of a sumbarine rotting away in the car park and a dusty PDP/11 tucked away in a side room. They could have far more on display, preserve things much better and generally give the place, people and things the attention and respect they deserve if only they had the money. There is no shortage of will, knowledge or dedication, only cash. If you're ever in the UK, go. If you aren't, give them a donation.

To donate via paypal go here:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/paypal-donate.rhtm

or by WorldPay:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/changeDonate.rhtm

No excuses. If you live in the UK, go for a visit. Fantastic place full of great exhibits.

Darren.

To donate via paypal go here:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/paypal-donate.rhtm

or by WorldPay:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/changeDonate.rhtm

No excuses. If you live in the UK, go for a visit. Fantastic place full of great exhibits.

Darren.

Consider purchasing a pocket enigma, or making a donation (link from their home page or as part of order).

Consider purchasing a pocket enigma, or making a donation (link from their home page or as part of order).

Yes, the government will do little towards this, but _YOU_ can
help if you care.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/contact/donation.rhtm

"Only by the site persisting can people become educated as to its significance and then realize its worth."

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_park'

Holy shit, I've been educated as to its significance and yet, I DIDN'T HAVE TO GO THERE.

It's a place where a job was done, get the fuck over yourself.

Tommy Flowers designed and built "Colossus" in 1943: the world's first practical electronic digital information processing machine.

A working example exists today at Bletchley Park.

Euston.

Not Enigma.

They used bombes to crack Enigma. Colossus was for a completely different cipher called Lorenz

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm

At least provide a link to the Bletchley Park museum itself!

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

It's a great visit. Go check it out. They don't get a lot of funding so they are very dependent on visitors (and volunteers if you live nearby) to help keep things going. They had to sell off some of their land recently to keep going (this is now getting turned into a local housing estate).

Bletchley Park not only has Enigma machines, they have recently completed a replica Bombe, and they're working on a replica Colossus.

Sheesh, you Americans - you make me smile. Stuff happens outside the US too.

Oh, sure. Next, you'll be telling us that the Americans didn't crack the German Enigma code (as per the film "U-571"), and that instead the code was cracked by a rag-tag collection of scientists, linguists and crossword-puzzle addicts at Bletchley Park in England. http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

The Americans do everything first. Everyone knows that (particularly the Americans).

A lot of websites seem to make the same mistake. However, Bletchley Park's own website agrees with you, and I guess we can take that is a fairly authoritative source:-

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Good point on the "Robinsons" too, although they do seem to refer to it as just "Robinson" more often than not.

That'll teach me just to read a couple of sources :P
Cheers,
Scoot.

man, please, grown up..

Enigma was cracked by Rajewski, Rozycki and Zygalski, does it looks like english names?

you're watching too many hollywood movies ;-)

http://www.enigmahistory.org/enigma.html
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/page.cfm?pageid=26 5
http://www.nsa.gov/museum/museu00007.cfm

The first car (automobile) was built by a Frenchman. or a german for the first petrol powered car.

The first electrical computers would be Bomba and Colossus both designed and built in Britain although the design of bomba was started by Poland before the war, I can't believe you forgot Poland.

One out of three that's not exactly intellectual, I think you proved the parent point for them.

Does anyone remember when one of the Enigma machines was stolen from Bletchley Park? Well, it is quite an amusing story (Aging BBC Link), about how it ended up in the hands of Jeremy Paxman after a nationwide manhunt. I just think it goes to show (and also perhaps defies one of the "why bother remembering Turing" posts from above) that Station X, Turing and Bletchley Park are still very much at the forefront of the British psyche. However, on the other side of the coin, and I think others may have posted something to the same effect, but the Government has little or no interest in the history surrounding Bletchley Park (Bletchley Park Official Website - Fund Request), and so this place is a dilapidated mess. Such a terrible, terrible shame.

It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers.

Actually, it was a bit more subtle than this. For a long time after the second world war the Allies were sitting very firmly on the knowledge that they'd broken the German code systems, and made no serious attempt to prevent the German engineers from going off to work for other countries. In consequence ... up until the 1960s or 1970s Britain and America had easy access to tools that could break almost any diplomatic or military cipher in use around the world. Meanwhile, these German engineers and ex-military were going around the world touting this system "which had remained secure through WW2". Yeah, right. And many people believed them.
Of course, since the original work that actually broke the Enigma code system was done in Poland, the Russians had found out that Enigma was broken. So they sold it to their client states, for exactly the same reasons.

Oh, you'd forgotten that the breaking of the Enigma system was done in pre-War Poland? That's OK - the people at Bletchley Park haven't forgotten.

Interesting links :
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ is a site by some of the people who worked at Bletchley Park.
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ is the official Bl.Pk. website. Shame they still haven't got any photos of the approach roads - it's a bit of a pig to find, even if you can navigate your way around Milton Keynes. I think they're trying to encourage visitors by train.
http://www.retrobeep.com/ is a link into the computer museum at Bl.Pk.

The code breakers in these small prefabricated huts probably shortened the war by two years and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Surely us geeks can help save this site and remember their contribution? If you can't get there to volunteer, maybe use their online form and give them a small donation? Their website is going to be slashdotted at this rate, so how about slashdotting their intray with donations?

As opposed to the weblog wo which the article is linked, which merely make glaring factual errors, such as:

This is a photograph of the Enigma cryptanalytic machine devised by Alan Turing

While ENIAC clearly progressed the technology, one can consider it merely a step between Bletchley Park's Colossus and The University of Manchester's "Baby", which is claimed to be the first device to have all the components that are now considered characteristic of a computer.

I remeber watching a TV show about Bletchly Park a few years ago. They interviewed one of the code breakers about the Colossus computer. They retired codebreaker remarked that he had written a machine-code implementation of the Colossus and ran it on the fasted PC he could find, but the hardware Colossus was still quicker at code breaking. Station X