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BT funds UK Crypto Heritage Park
evilandi writes "Bletchley Park, "home of the WW2 codebreakers and [allegedly!] the world's first electronic programmable computer" (Colossus I), has been saved following this deal with British Telecom. The historic site will be converted into part museum, part conference centre and part education resource- all specifically crypto oriented. WW2 hacker HQ "D-Block" (the precursor to GCHQ) will be restored along with the lovely grounds and manor house.
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Okay, the reason I put the word "allegedly" into my story quote is because I expected there to be some considerable disagreement about which was the "first" computer. Particularly since Germany, France, the UK and the USA all claim this honour (plus a few others I expect).
The problem is: what is a computer? Do you mean a calculator? So does an abacus count? Something that runs a program? So does a weaving loom count? Something electronic that runs a program? So does a washing machine count? Something digital? Something that has a modifyable program? Something that stores its program in the same way as its data?
As you can see, there are many definitions of "computer". Stop bickering!
And to add to that, early computers were often an international effort. Certianly Bletchley Park relied heavily on US involvement towards the end of the war.
That doesn't detract from the fact that Bletchley Park was a major contributor to both cryptography and modern computing.
Anyway, here's a few more British historical computing links for those who like nostaligia. If anyone would like to add some links to sites about other historical computers- of any nation- I'd be most interested.
Colossus I
The LEO - Lyons Electric Office (my dad worked on this)
The WITCH (my dad worked on this, too!)
The Baby
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Colossus was developed to break the Enigma ciphers used by the German navy and airforce; this was earlier in the war than the Manhattan project which gave birth to ENIAC. The first breaks were done with special-purpose machines (the "bombs"); more refined versions of the ciphers were broken later by Colossus, which was (more?) general purpose.
I don't have my copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma (of Intelligence) by Andrew Hodges handy, but I recall it dates the majority of Turing's Bletchley park in 1941-43.
ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer. Colossus was specific to code-breaking. I'd previously read that the Atanosoff-Berry Computer (ca.1939) (see also the links from that page, and this page) was the first programmable electronic computer, and it was specialized for solving linear systems of floating-point equations (at a whopping 3.75 flops). The designers wanted to be able to input & output as fast as the machine could support it, so they abandoned mechanical card readers & writers. Instead, they read cards by passing them under an electric field and measuring the disturbances in the field made by the holes. The wrote to the cards by using a 5kV spark to burn holes into the cards.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Fantastic news! Last week there was a lot of speculation in the British media that BillG was going to 'save' it by funding some restoration and building an MS 'campus' on some of the land. That would have been a real insult to the achievements of Bletchley Park and the role of military intelligence in the defeat of the Axis.
Speaking of the first stored-program computer, turns out I have a connection to it I didn't know about. It turns out that both Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams, who built the Mark I, worked (and first met) at TRE, the Telecommunications Research Establishment (actually, they did radar research) in Malvern. Which happens to be where my parents worked (and first met) during the same period, my dad also doing radar research.
:-)
I guess I come from a long line of nerds
-- Alastair
They were probably American classes ;-)
ENIAC was certainly the first something, but I forget what it was. It wasn't the first stored program computer; that came later. EDSAC was the first one of those IIRC.
Everyone: what was so great about ENIAC again? I can't remember!
The Colossus WAS the first single-purpose electronic computer built in Britain, 1943. ENIAC however was the first fully functioning machine to use binary. Other claimants include the German Z-3, built be Konrad Zuse in 1941.
The work undertaken at Bletchely Park was integral to the timely end of WWII. Code name was Ultra. The main task was to simulate a captured German Enigma machine by cracking the Enigma code which Germany transmitted in apparent secrecy thoughout h te war. Enigma had been patented in WW1 to encipher and decipher messages, and was used in civilian life in the interwar years. The Colossus Project entailed highly classified work whose scale and implications were not revealed until thirty years after the war. It was an enormous undertaking, commanding the attentions of a large number of mathematicians, linguists, as well as whole troops of technicians.
In many ways the tribute is a double banger in that it memorialises not just the birth of the application of computers in industrialised society, but also our freedom.
Yippee!
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
By the way, I found this nifty link on Bletchley Park's site. It's a Java simulation of the Enigma machine (the rotor cipher scheme used by Germans in WW2.) It's really cool and educative.
http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rus sell/classes/enigma/
I think I'm gonna devote some time to this... Have a friend encipher a few messages, then try a few modern attacks. It's nice to see how far we've come in crypto since WW2. Though I bet Enigma is still a pain to break on your own.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."