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Cash Lifeline For Bletchley Park
Smivs writes "Bletchley Park, the home to the allied codebreakers during WWII, and a major computing heritage centre, has been given a financial lifeline, reports the BBC. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works as the rooms of the Grade II-listed mansion, replete with painted ceilings, timber panelling, and ornate plasterwork, are at risk because the roof has been patched rather than renovated so many times during the 130 years of the mansion's history.
The donation follows efforts to highlight the dilapidated state of the huts and other buildings at Bletchley.
Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site.
'Bletchley Park played a fundamental role in the Allies winning the Second World War and is of great importance to the history of Europe,' said Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage."
You would think that the popularity of Cryptonomicon among the public, nerds and not-so-nerdy people alike, would have translated into a bit more enthusiasm for preserving some of those old crypto legends. Did Stephenson himself ever issue a call for support?
I'm glad to see that war heritage sites are not just being allowed to fall by the way side. They need to be preserved AND used.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Seems to me that some of the guys running the big tech companies should kick in a little something... Given Bletchley's place in computing history, Gates, Jobs, et al should throw them a bone. Even in this economy, Gates could probably fund it himself without really noticing a hit in his wallet.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Where do Slashdotters send their $5/10/20 or £5/10/20 then?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Hey Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel.
Each of you are swiming in cash and this is your history.
Why not pony up some bucks for History.
While your at it the Apollo 1 launch pad is also fading away.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They tried to donate, but when they ran the address through their decryption software they couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
You would never suspect that everyone at this school is a professional dancer.
*ba dum bump*! TING!
Seriously though, it's funny how the British government (among others), can find tens of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to bail out private businesses who are failing due to the incompetence of those running those businesses yet, it can't find a few meager thousands of dollars to repair one building who helped save its own hide.
Just goes to show where priorities lie.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
...that just spent US$73 million dollars arguing over Proposition 8 - should there be same sex marriage in the state of California.
I'm not American, or gay, but it fucking shits me when I see this sort of money being thrown around - in the middle of this epic credit crisis, no less - over something as utterly trivial as whether or not gay people can get married, when there's actual, serious, important things all over the world that get practically no funding.
I don't know how much money came from where but the AP article I read indicates that (unsurprisingly) lots of it comes from various religious organisations, including the Mormon Church which various sources say have raised between US$8 million and US$17 million alone.
Pretty sad state of affairs, really.
"Yay"
http://pinopsida.com
When you see some of (frankly) SHIT that the National Lottery in the UK funds, it's mind boggling to me that they haven't ponied up some cash for this site already.
Maybe as a Lottery, they feel a deep resentment for anyone who is good at math? I don't know.
I've visited Bletchley Park. It's a nice day trip out from London. The actual exhibits aren't that extensive. They have a few Enigmas, a fancier version with twelve rotors and a teletype machine interface, some replica bombes (some from a movie), the replica Colossus, and a collection of minor crypto-related items. The whole collection would fit in a corner of the Imperial War Museum.
It's a big country estate that needs to be maintained. There's a manor house, a lake with swans, some outbuildings, and the remainder of the famous "huts". There's far too much real estate for the exhibits. The technical exhibits aren't in the manor house at all. The manor house is used for conferences and such. The upkeep on all that real estate is the problem.
It's nice that it's being maintained, but there's not that much to see there.
why would you appeal to tech companies to preserve the apollo 1 launch pad when there are wealthy aerospace companies getting rich off the war?
Please keep an eye on your roofing contractors, so they don't burn it down like happened with David Garrick's 18th century mansion.
Bletchley Park (I have some VAXen that went through you at one point, and we'll both pretend you crushed the media... ;-) is the father of GCHQ, the British sorta-NSA. It would not, of course, dream of allocating any part of its budget to the memory of its intellectual founders, because it differs from Bletchley in one important respect: Bletchley fought a real war against a real threat to the nation.
On the off-chance that the guys that jumped into the Service from the same crappy minor public school I went to are reading this: sorry to hear you weren't good enough to get into the City, and let Ulbricht serve as your modest guide to the new century. No matter what you achieve, your old schoolchums will always know that you did it because you weren't bright enough to do anything more creative.
What I thought interesting was that they didn't talk about it for at least 40 years after the work there. The security aspect, and war reticence, I guess.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Hi all,
I'm the person that went to Bletchley Park in July, got really annoyed at the state of the huts etc. got 97 signatures from UK Heads and Professors of Computing, sent in a letter to the Times and ended up on the BBC (which was a bit nerve racking to say the least).
The EH money is a great first step towards saving BP, but loads more funding needs to be found. You can help with this by talking to friends/colleagues etc. about it and forwarding the URL for my campaign blog which gives a lot more details of everything plus has a link to the petition and the online donation URL.
We must save BP. The work that went on there shortened WWII by 2 years, thus saving a possible 22 million(!) lives. It is also the birthplace of the modern computer. The National Museum of Computing is there with loads of really interesting machines and peripherals.
Most people don't realise how fundamental its contribution was because everything has been kept so secret for so many years. There are many, many people who still have not told anyone of their involvement, several thousand people worked there everyday on long shifts around the clock for years. It was so secretive that they often did not know what the people in the next hut were doing. There are loads of fascinating stories to be heard.
My blog is here:
www.savingbletchleypark.org
Please help to save BP.
Thanks
Sue