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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
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.
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
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.