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Tunny Code-Breaker Rebuilt At Bletchley Park
Jack Spine writes "Engineers at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park have rebuilt the Tunny machine, a key device used in decoding German High Command messages during the Second World War. The Tunny machine took a team of three people three years to rebuild. At the end of the war, Tunny machines were broken up and the components recycled, while the original circuit diagrams were destroyed or hidden. The team had to piece together plans for the machine from odd pieces of circuit diagram that had been squirreled away by engineers, as well as from the recollections of some of the original builders."
Got to love geeks that love their jobs so much that they'll go beyond the impossible to rebuild something that was broken down and sold for scrap.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
TFA is a little light on information on the "Tunny" code breaker (Tunny is the nickname for the German Lorenz cipher machine), so here's the link to the wikipedia for further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher
http://www.tnmoc.org
(sorry about double post - crap /. ui + n900 + train = fail)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Probably better than walking into a museum and finding an empty spot where the Ford Model T would be if there were any left in the world. (it's a car analogy)
I read the internet for the articles.
*intake of breath*
ARM - The processor architecture designer. If you've have a smartphone, any smartphone, there's a 90% chance there's an ARM designed chip or processor in there.
Pace - The largest Set Top Box manufacturer in the world
Sage - 3rd biggest enterprise resource software in the world
Symbian - First created by PSION software in the 90's.
Codemasters - Still churning out Colin McRae/DIRT racing games
Traveller's Tales - LEGO *insert film franchise* game developers
Splash Damage - Developers of Brink
Lionhead - Developers of Fable
Criterion - Developers of the Burnout series
Rare - Goldeneye, latterly Kinect developers
The list goes on. And I might be British but my teeth are OUTSTANDING.
Does anybody know if they've put together/published a detailed set of drawings for this machine? Given how much work it was to create it and how cool/historically significant it is, it would be nice if the hardcore nerds among us could order copies of the detailed technical information.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I do applaud the team who spent many countless hours rebuilding such a machine, but I'm really curious as to the reasoning behind such an effort.
This is kind of like walking into an automobile museum and finding a replica of a Ford Model T, built with modern blended steels. It just isn't quite the same.
Except now imagine there were no existing Model Ts to use as a reference, no diagrams, no instructions on how to contruct it, the original machinery used to make the model T is all gone, and all you had to go off of was what they described, including people's memory from 70 years ago.
So yeah, just like it, except not...
A government's obsession with secrecy is not always a logical thing.
Richard Hammond .... is that you?
A government's obsession with secrecy is not always a logical thing.
The thing your forgetting is that we didn't want any of our temporary allies to advance their code breaking tech on our backs. Since we had advanced in our tech they were obsolete but still valuable to other nations they were destroyed because we had no use for them but other countries may have. Lots of military grade electronics are repurposed or destroyed today for the exact same reason.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The Bletchley Park guys figured out how the Lorenz machines worked by decoding messages by hand. They then built the Tunny machines to emulate a Lorenz machine. The actual codebreaking was mostly done by a Heath Robinson machine (or later, a Colossus), this yielded the correct wheel settings. These settings were then entered in the Tunny machines, and these could be used to decrypt the day's Lorenz traffic.
I was at Bletchley Park last year and saw the Tunny exhibit. Didn't realize that they were still working on the rebuild.
Oddly enough, the American counterparts to Colossus were never destroyed. Instead these became prototypes of commercial computing equipment, built by the likes of IBM.
History is full of examples of technology, developed by the Allies (primarily the British) that was abandoned at home, but pursued by the USA for commercial gain. Radar and magnetrons, gas turbine engines, vacuum tube (as opposed to relay) logic, supersonic flight, to name a few. The Canadians development of a supersonic fighter/bomber industry was also stopped with the cancellation of the Arrow, possibly at the request of the USA military aircraft industry.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why?