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Restored Bletchly Park Opens
Graculus (3653645) writes with this excerpt from the BBC: Codebreakers credited with shortening World War Two worked in Bletchley Park, in structures built to last only a few years. Now, following a painstaking restoration, they have been brought back to life and Wednesday's official opening marks a remarkable turnaround from top secrecy to world wide attraction. With no photographs of the insides to work with, Bletchley Park looked to its most valuable resource — the veterans who worked there. A museum at the site has already been opened.
The structures were once perilously close to being lost forever (until Google stepped in).
The sheds are (or were) rotton old sheds. Interesting stuff may happened in them, but they're still sheds.
The crown jewel of Bletchley is the national museum of computing, which is apparently treated like shit by the people who control the property and think the manor is the good bit. It isn't.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I guess you guys will never learn to proofread your headlines.
In seventy years time people might well be restoring the Utah Data Center as a monument to the War on Terror.
Although unpopular (/phony) wars do tend to get less monuments I guess.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
They were spying on the militaries of countries they were at war with, nothing morally questionable about that.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's really good, you're making great progress. keep at it old boy!
Kudos to your Dad. Less so for you using him as an opportunity to spam your questionable products. Downmodded
So how did they ensure they were only spying on just other militaries? Also, they didn't care about rooting out spies on the homeland either? I'm amazed at the technical capabilities they had to not intercept any civilian traffic at all.
To intercept the German (and Japanese) communications, our spies listened to everything they could — and recorded whatever they deemed useful.
Today's snowdens would've been outraged...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's easy when civilians aren't broadcasting on frequencies reserved for military use. Listen on the bands that contain only military information and you will intercept only military information.
Surley restoring means putting it back to how it was? But haven't they changed it? The old hut looks brown on the outside and now it's green. The railings look different on another picture too (maybe for health/safety issues?).
So how did they ensure they were only spying on just other militaries? Also, they didn't care about rooting out spies on the homeland either? I'm amazed at the technical capabilities they had to not intercept any civilian traffic at all.
Given that their hardware was purpose built, this was before general purpose computing, to specifically crack German military cipher machines the civilian traffic was not at great risk.
... we consider them good code breakers, you know, before all this "imperialism" stuff started? ...
Actually they were literally imperial code breakers serving the British Empire.
Bletchley Park looked to its most valuable resource — the veterans who worked there
...and fired them for daring to show historic computers to visitors. And then kicking out the amateur radio society to replace them with a gift shop, and finally putting up a chain link fence to make sure nobody accidentally visits the real museum in building H.
The only reason the current Bletchley park management haven't levelled the place to put up a Starbucks is that the donors might notice and cut off their multi-million pound gravy train.
Oh, and before I forget, you clearly are a government shill, so eat shit and die you stasist sonofabitch.
They were spying on the militaries of countries they were at war with
They were spying on British Citizens too... If you went to your shortwave in your attic and typed out a coded message that you sent across the Channel to occupied Europe, Bletchley Park would decode it.
I swear Dice are owned by the corporate droids at Apple and the Rockstar consortium who are attempting to kill off the Gnu/Linux Rebels alongside the Win32 *I refuse to use Metro' rebels and Android Raiders! When Cmdr Taco & Linus Torvalds along with RMS dies I say this ' This house of Github & Bletchly will become a shrine for Geeks, WinNuts and Droids as they gather around in sorrow of their fallen leaders and proclaim Have you Heard RMS is dead, The people's Hacker is Dead!'...
Codes are just DRM, so I'm pretty sure we hate them...unless we're using them for anonymity or security, in which case we love them...unless they're protecting State secrets...in which case we hate them.
wow,
dude,
think of your blood pressure!
German military cipher machines were small variants of the commercial "Enigma" cipher machine.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Well, the AC has posed the question in an amazingly ham-handed way, but it is a point worth making.
Bletchley Park was the direct ancestor of the NSA and GCHQ.
It was the start of industrial scale sigint, and the largest part of the project was being run in the US by the end of the war. (Bletchley handed over the Enigma decoding to the US in order to concentrate on the trickier Lorenz cipher, for which they built Colossus).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I visited BP a few years ago for the first time. I was under a bit of time pressure as I had to take a plane from Heathrow, so only had about an hour to do it all. I wanted to see the Colossus and made my way straight from the entrance office to the back where this is housed. I went through a door and interrupted a guy who was talking to a video camera to make a video presentation. He was REALLY upset at being distracted and let of a fair bit of steam, before he banished me alone to the room where the collossus machines are installed. A couple of minutes later another guy appeared to officially open up, and he too was a bit surprised to find me already there only ten minues after BP had opened for the day. After a short explanation he went and talked to the first guy who came back with him, and a profuse apology and a personal tour of the machines and the closed sections of the nascent NMOC followed. The guy at the video camera turned out to be Dr. Tony Sale, who played a huge part in the campaign to stop BP being turned into a housing estate in the late 80s. It was a fascinating tour, and he got something out of it too: When we came to the mobile device exhibit I commented that he was missing the first touch screen mobile phone / PDA. He said "we would love to have one, but can't find one." Ten days lated he received a package with a mint IBM Simon, which I had kept in the cellar for almost ten years. BTW I missed my plane.
Every one can have an off day, but Dr. Sale had the grace to immediately admit it and turned my frist negative experience into a posistive one that I will never forget. He's probably spinning in his grave right now......
Incidentally, there is also a great museum of computing in Switzerland http://www.enter-online.ch/
German military cipher machines were small variants of the commercial "Enigma" cipher machine.
The additional wheels and the plugboard did not constitute a minor change. While it was certainly possible to break the simpler commercial machine if one could break the harder military machine, the fact remains that the "computer" used by the British was purpose built for a single task. It was not reprogrammable for the simpler commercial machine, a hardware rebuild would have been necessary.
the fact remains that the "computer" used by the British was purpose built for a single task. It was not reprogrammable for the simpler commercial machine, a hardware rebuild would have been necessary.
No, the commercial Enigma was effectively a sub-set of the military Enigmas - a Bombe would have no problem with the lack of the plug-board (it would just be one possible setting of the plug-board: no letters swapped). The four-rotor Enigma only came into use in 1942 and the army continued to use the three rotor machines.
The US Navy Bombe contained 16 four-rotor Enigma-analogues and was much faster than the British three-rotor Bombes, even for a three-rotor task.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
When you say "computer" I get the feeling you are confusing the Collosus with the Bombes, and although Collosus was not a stored program machine it could be "reprogrammed" for different tasks by changing switches and plugs, and was used for more than one task.
Watch this Heartland Institute video