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Restored Bletchly Park Opens

Posted by Unknown on from the things-to-see dept.

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).

5 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Those sheds are sheds by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    1. Re:Those sheds are sheds by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

      Right. I've been there, but back in 2002, before they got real money. The people giving tours are obsessed with the buildings. The sheds are, indeed, sheds - temporary buildings built during WWII. Even the manor house isn't architecturally significant. It's only a Grade II listed building, along with about 300,000 other Grade II listed buildings in the UK.

      Nobody seems to be interested in the room at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton where von Neumann had the EDVAC built. It's a storeroom now. The EDVAC was a real general purpose computer, with the "von Neumann architecture" all later computers followed.

      "Colossus" and the bombes were special-purpose machines for crypto key testing, like the ASICs used for Bitcoin mining. They really belong to the separate history of digital special-purpose machines, such as SIGSALY (digital voice encryption), Reservisor (travel reservations), American Totalizators's racetrack hardware, Teleregister's stock exchange and inventory control hardware, and Western Union's message switching systems. All that stuff is obsolete and forgotten.

  2. Re:Bletchley, not Bletchly! by NatasRevol · · Score: 3, Funny

    Where is the honououour in that?

    --
    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  3. Re:When nobody thought of privacy by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Right, because there's absolutely no difference between spying on your enemies in a declared war and spying on your own citizens in peacetime.

  4. Whose press release was this copied from? by Minwee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.