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PGP Leads Corporate Efforts To Save Bletchley Park
blake182 writes "CNET reports that PGP, together with IBM and other technology firms, is mounting a fundraising effort to benefit the ailing Bletchley Park, home of the Station X codebreaking efforts in World War II. 'We're calling attention (to the fact that) Bletchley is falling into disrepair, and that, probably, the world owes a debt of gratitude to that place,' said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP."
We owe lots of stuff to lots of things from the second world war. Nice to see corporations like this getting involved; then again, this is part of PGP's history.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
In May 2008 it was announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation turned down a request for funds because the foundation only funds Internet-based technology projects.
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Nissan were working with Nazi Germany to build their own V1/2 rockets.
That would be Nissan the Japanese company, based in a country which was allied with Nazi Germany?
Consider purchasing a pocket enigma, or making a donation (link from their home page or as part of order).
Loose lips lose spit.
The British newspaper The Independent started a campaign to save Betchley Park on 20 August 2008. I wonder if these are connected ?
Sounds like a great cause - it should definitely be preserved.
I went there recently and I really loved it. My wife however was very bored. She found it more interesting however when there were speakers talking about the history.
I preferred the really techy stuff - particularly seeing electronic commponents that I worked with when I first started making electronic projects. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for the exibits) you could not touch them. Probably a good thing otherwise I might have been taking the Bombe apart to get a better idea how it worked.
Perhaps they need different color coded streams:
Children, young geeks, wives (or non-geek husbands), old farts.
I hope they get funding sorted. This place is real history. More than almost any castle or birthplace tourist "adventure".
There's no price-tag because this isn't the sort of thing you buy off a store shelf. The first thing they'll need is a budget to do is a museum-grade architectural survey.
Have you seen Bletchley Park? It's not just the main building but the remaining temporary WW2 structures.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/locations/bletchley-park/bletchlypark-l-lewin/index.html
The survey can produce a series of restoration & upkeep senarios, based on how much activity & cost can be devoted over what periods of time, and how much each year of delay will add to the costs and losses. Till that (expensive) survey is done, no one can quote remotely realistic figures.
Another detail: when I was a renovation carpenter it was a firm requirement that any time a project required a wall to be opened, the client MUST have 60% over budget in the bank to deal with unpleasant surprises. Most of the houses I dealt with were less than 100 years old. Even houses built in the 60s regularly had surprise structural problems. About three of those required immediate work that was a good deal more than 60%.
Getting a complex like Bletchley Park surveyed and a reliable maintenance schedule put in place is going to be a major work in itself. Then the costs and compromises (yes, the sheds will probably have to be let go. or replaced by replicas.) are going to be frankly enormous compared to what the place can draw in revenue. No wonder the usual sources have shied away. A serious influx of cash from special-interest groups as proposed is really the only chance the place has of getting to a (still expensive) maintainable state.
Not exactly. The company's german arm, isolated from the american one, invented it to keep the plant in operation during the war, when they could not get the Coca Cola syrup.
* http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/coke/coke2.html
* http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/fanta.asp
Circumcision is child abuse.
I think you underestimate. The book "IBM and the Holocaust" details how the CEO of IBM was closely involved with Nazi Germany, even receiving a medal. These systems were not off the shelf, but custom-built for the Nazis' needs. After the war, when everyone was aware what had happened in the concentration camps, IBM insisted on recovering its profits from the machines used at the camps. They have subsequently refused to apologise for the company's role.
And just because the allies did nothing to stop the holocaust, that doesn't mean that it wasn't being reported. It was known about, especially at higher levels, but generally ignored.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I am a crypto buff who happened to be in London last month, and took the train up to visit Bletchley Park, all a-quiver to see the rebuilt Bombe and the Colossus. The park is really just a architecturally-Frankensteined mansion and a collection of "huts" with a few exhibits of crypto equipment and wartime memorabilia. It was bloody fascinating to see all the equipment up close, albeit behind glass. The equipment was simultaneously clever and primitive and bulky. The huts were so rude and tiny! Imagine all those people doing the anxious codebreaking work in such environs back then. I don't want the experience of visiting BP to be Disneyfied, but the cramped, amateurish presentation was a bit of a letdown.
Bletchley Park is not an amusement park. By that, I mean it is not as casually approachable as carnival rides and cotton candy. You'd have to be interested in some aspect of Bletchley to even seek it out. (BP is more than an hour's train ride outside of London, and the casual London tourist/resident is bombarded with advertisements for a buttload of attractive venues to visit, many of them historically important or beautiful or great fun, or all of the above.) This means the target demographic for BP is going to be relatively small. Unless you are into history or cryptography, you probably would prefer to hang out outside Buckingham Palace with the rest of the tourists and watch the guys with them fuzzy hats march around. (There were thousands of tourists ambling by Buckingham Palace one afternoon, compared to the trickle of visitors to Bletchley.)
But subject matter aside, I agree with thermian that the exhibits are badly in need of better presentation and preservation. If you have made the effort to visit Bletchley Park, you want to be engaged. There are guided tours, but they seem awfully bland. I wandered around at my own pace with a map and one of those audio tour headset thingys. One hut was packed full of wartime comms equipment from various nations, but without much background or other info to accompany each item. I approached the tiny wizened docent soldering something in the corner and he was semi-informative. Lucky I visited on the one day of the week that this hut was open to visitors.
However, it looked like they were setting up a new exhibit in one of the other huts, so maybe things are improving.
The PGP page for the effort wasn't up yet when the CNET story broke, but it is now. More information there.
The American arm of IBM was probably prohibited from "trading with the enemy" from the point that the USA entered the war.
As for BP - they had a big punched-card data centre (The Freebornery) in hut 7, equipped with the sorters, collators, duplicating punches and tabulators typical of any big 1930's office automation effort. Much of this would have been IBM equipment, the rest was from ICT in Letchworth, the same company that built the Bombes.
BP's "Freebornery" played a vital role in running Banburismus against German naval traffic from 1941 to 1943.
IBM and ICT equipment were crucial to BP. When, after the war was over, it was discovered that the nazis had IBM equipment too, I doubt anyone batted an eyelid. Were US soldiers outraged to find "IBM PC"s (with Intel or AMD processors inside) in Saddam Hussein's offices? I doubt it.