Bletchley Park / National Museum of Computing

[Sparrowhawk]

For Christmas my wife got us tickets to visit Bletchley and the National Museum of Computing (pretty much next door). We stayed overnight at a B&B nearby, and it's a good thing we did as there was too much to do to do it all in a single day.

I can highly recommend it to anyone who has not already been to Bletchley. It's one of the best experiences of the kind that I have ever seen. It felt quite strange walking around the grounds, huts and manor house, almost sensing the WW2 staff and codebreakers around you. When you hear and read of the details of their accomplishments, it's truly inspiring.

The computing museum has working replicas of the Turing-Welchman Bombe and Tommy Flowers' Colossus computers (as well as its Robinson predecessor). Really astonishing what they came up with given the materials that they had to hand. The volunteers who run it are all so passionate and full of knowledge.

Also there are computers from the 60, 70s and 80s, many of which I'd never seen other than online or magazines, such as an Apple Lisa, Camputers Lynx, PDP/8 etc.

As an aside, the QL sort of makes an appearance there in the form of 2 OPDs and some QL World magazines

https://bletchleypark.org.uk/
https://www.tnmoc.org/

[stevepoole]

Hi Jean-Yves,,

Here's a great very thorough talk all about all the wartime achievements at Bletchley Park...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2tMcMQqSbA

Steve.
________

[XorA]

I have photos somewhere of all the stuff they have in storage sheds too! It looks like the typical qlforum members garage

[NormanDunbar]

Tommy Flowers needs more recognition than he got/gets.

Disagree at your peril!

Cheers,
Norm.

[Pr0f]

Tommy Flowers needs more recognition than he got/gets.

Disagree at your peril!

Cheers,
Norm.

You won't get any argument from me on that one - he did eventually get a little recognition and a road named after him, but the guy was truly visionary to have put into physical form the concepts discussed by the very talented mathematicians

Largely suppressed by the UK and American governments so we didn't know all of what went on until very recently - and I suspect not all of it even now.

[Sparrowhawk]

Hi Jean-Yves,,

Here's a great very thorough talk all about all the wartime achievements at Bletchley Park...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2tMcMQqSbA

Steve.
________

Yep I remember watching that a while back - truly amazing. Got lost in the algorithm/maths side very quickly but amazing stuff.

@norm - yes, totally agree about Tommy Flowers. Amazing work. And never compensated for using his own funds. B*stards.
And also Bill Tutt. Both the tour guide at Bletchley and the chap giving us the Colossus demo said of his work that it was "the greatest intellectual achievement of the second world war". Which, when you consider that he reverse engineered a Lorenz machine from its ciphered output, never having seen one....

Mind you, who knows what else is still under the official secrets acts of the various countries and which we will hear about at some stage.

[Sparrowhawk]

Oh yeah, I also got some second hand Apple ][ and Amiga manuals from the computer museum in exchange for a donation. Gave them what I'd have paid on eBay, even though they kept insisting it was too much. But you can't rip off a museum!

[XorA]

Another Bletchley Park adventure I had was running into Arnold Hargreaves of the stealing the Enigma machine from a u-boat fame.

He was a fantastic character!