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."

Comments

Love for old crypto

[CRCulver]

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?

Re:Love for old crypto

[Patchw0rk F0g]

Actually, I just re-read that recently. Not only does it add to the appreciation of what our fore-fathers were doing, but brings it up to date (at the time, at least) with what was/is current in cryptonography.

I'm glad that Bletchley's getting a new lease on life. There is/was a museum in Oshawa, Ontario that was dedicated to the Canadian war effort, and had at one time information as to the efforts that we gave to similar code-breaking endeavours. As of time of writing, I think that's been over-grown by an airport expansion. Sad. I hope they kept those logs and diaries for future generations.

That was my first foray into crypto. I hope someone saved it so that it's someone else's first exposure to it, too.

Re:Love for old crypto

[Yvanhoe]

Maybe it would have worked better if he actually wrote a historical novel. I am aware that I am bashing a popular author here but, seriously, at this place and time things happened that were so incredible that there is no need to add all this crappy fictional things around real facts. Simon Singh's "The Code Book" is far more breathtaking and it is a history book.

Heroism surrounded code breakers in Poland where the first mechanical algorithmic machines were made with the help of the secret services. Germany had their share of the game with their first programmable electronic device (some would call it a computer). The weirdness surrounding the decision of choosing an Indian language as American code (no, it was not because it was supposedly harder to break, but it was faster to have a native speaker of a code than a cryptographer who needed minutes to code even a short message). Bletchley recruitment effort that involved crosswords games, the sad story of Turing death cause by his mandated anti-homosexuality treatment, Yamamoto's death possible because of a message interception and so on...

WWII is so full of facts and anecdotes that trading them for a fictional content can only look tasteless...

Lame.

[macthulhu]

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.

Re:Lame.

[1stvamp]

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation refused to offer any support to Bletchley earlier this year.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/05/16/1225225.shtml

Re:Lame.

[macthulhu]

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.

Re:Lame.

[macthulhu]

One more time, to clarify... I contribute what I can in my field of expertise. I was merely suggesting that there are some luminaries in the field that would be a good match. I realize everyone is touchy about the redistribution of wealth these days, but I'm pretty far from suggesting it be taxed out of anyone. I support the idea of people giving to projects that relate to the foundation of careers that they have found massive success in, of their own free will. Charitable giving, especially to something closely related to one's own good fortune and interests and the preservation of history is a decent thing to do. That is all. Relax.

So where do we send our bucks?

[David Gerard]

Where do Slashdotters send their $5/10/20 or £5/10/20 then?

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[dpoulson]

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.

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[eln]

$5/10/20

It's nice that you want to help, but I don't think sending 2.5 cents is really going to have that much of an effect on the project.

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[houstonbofh]

$5/10/20

It's nice that you want to help, but I don't think sending 2.5 cents is really going to have that much of an effect on the project.

Perhaps, but given the economy, those 2.5 cents in todays dollars will be $30 in 2012 dollars. Not sure if this is actually funny, or terrifying. I'll let the mods decide.

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 (-:

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[VShael]

If you live in the UK, go for a visit. Fantastic place full of great exhibits.

I've been. They have a cool computer museum there.

And let me tell you, NOTHING in the world can make you feel as old as being in frakin museum and finding yourself saying "I remember those!"

Just ask John McCain.

Re:So where do we send our bucks?

[N. Criss]

Maybe not individually, but if you could turn even a tiny fraction of the typical Slashdot effect into a donation effect then as a community we could make a very big difference. I just gave 5GBP, which PayPal calculated as just over $8 US. Any other nerds willing to help out?

I can think of a few groups that should pony up.

[LWATCDR]

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.

It's funny, isn't it?

[smooth wombat]

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.

Re:It's funny, isn't it?

[iamapizza]

No it isn't funny, it makes sense.

A government's priorities lie with immediate issues, not with entities that won't have an immediate effect. Saving Bletchley park is a matter of sentimentality and history and a government or corporation has every right to choose to ignore it - I'd rather they spent their efforts at least talking about the current economic crisis than helping a WW relic. When things are better, that'd be the time to look at anything else.

Conversely, if the government decided to give it, say GBP/USD40 million, others would complain about the government wasting their tax money.

So yes, it goes to show where the priorities lie and I'm glad its attention isn't wandering away.

How about the state of California...

[trawg]

...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.

There's not really that much there

[Animats]

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.

Re:There's not really that much there

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Dude! Your idea of what the word "museum" means is skewed by the fact that you're familiar with the museums of what is possibly the #1 museum location in the world, London. Bletchley Park is a fine museum with plenty of exhibits and reconstructed wartime rooms including actual Enigma machines and teletypes, reconstructed Bombes and an amazing reconstruction of Colossus. You get to see the actual buildings in which WWII cryptography took place including the huts. You also get a guided tour full of interesting historical anecdotes. Of course it's smaller than the Imperial War Museum, the latter was created by a national government effort and is probably one of the largest museums of its type in the entire world.

GCHQ showing itself for what it is

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bletchley staff

[Kittenman]

Back in the '80s, my Dad and stepmother were watching a TV show on Bletchley here in NZ. During the adverts, My Dad mentioned that he'd been there (minor capacity - probably a clerk, but lord knows). Turns out that my stepmother was there too, different dates.

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.