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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 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
Wow. Not that I owe your condescending ass an explanation, but allow me to elaborate. I build, repair, and support computers for a non-profit organization. I'm also on their board of directors, and partially responsible for advising the tech needs of the arts programs of every school in my county. In what would normally be billable hours for me, I probably contribute an amount equal to about 40% of my income each year. My field is less related to the actual general birth of computing, so my contribution is geared toward my particular expertise. My suggestion that people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would be good contributors was related to their A) role in the early stages of personal computing, and B) their high profiles as entrepreneurs... which would be good publicity for the cause. Your veiled implication that I'm hoping to redistribute the wealth of others, and not my own, is a lame, reactionary jumping of the gun that was completely uncalled for. If your level of discourse is the "future of the world", I will join you in lamenting our future. So wag your finger at somebody else jackass.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
I second that. When I made it there after a business trip, I really wished I had more time. There is so much to browse it's hard to fit into an afternoon. The volunteers that give the tour are great...highly recommend it. They, however, wouldn't answer my question about if they used the enigma to insert messages, orders, or replies to any of the Germans in order to confuse them (-:
They didn't have the Bombe replica running when I was there, really wanted to see that.
The best thing they did have was a complete working replica of the Colossus Mark 2 up and running. This thing was build by volunteers that reconstructed it purely from pictures and from the memories of women who ran it during the war. It filled a room and kept it at 80+ degrees in there. It was built to decipher messages from the Lorenz machine, and it did it faster than optimized decryption software running on a Pentium II. There's definitely something to be said for optimized hardware.
They were in the process of re-opening a national computing museum or something of the like, so hopefully that's an exhibit there now as well.
And not that the walk around town wasn't nice, but take a right on the street in front of the station you get off at if you ride the rail to get there (-:
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.