97 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
97 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "Visit to Bletchley Park and The National Museum of Computing"
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slug: /bletchley-park-tnmoc-holiday/
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date: 2024-08-07
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tags: ["personal", "beige", "gruvbox"]
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---
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As part of our holiday this year my girlfriend and I went to visit
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[Bletchley Park](https://bletchleypark.org.uk/) and
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[The National Museum of Computing](https://www.tnmoc.org/).
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With our customary taste for luxury, we stayed in one of the three Premier Inns
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in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes is strange: a car park in search of a town.
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However, we had the good fortune to overlook one of its supermalls. This is
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notable only because it _looks exactly like a sandworm in Dune_:
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Bletchley was superb. A model of how to run a heritage project and museum. We
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spent about five hours on site stopping for lunch and an excellent cup of tea.
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As you work your way through the huts you pass through each region of what was a
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global signals intelligence factory: collection, decryption, evaluation, and
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finally dissemination.
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The huts concerned with decryption were naturally the most compelling. There was
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life size replica of the Bombe computer used to derive the daily settings of the
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Enigma machine. It had spinning and clicking rotars however this was a
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simulation rather than a working reconstruction.
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Probably the biggest highlight for me was standing at "the birthplace of the
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modern computer": the hut where the Colossus computer was used to decipher the
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Lorenz messages of the German high command.
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Although not a modern computer in the sense of being general-purpose (it could
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only be used for breaking this type of cipher and and was not programmable), it
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was the first to use vacuum-tubes for logic operations, rather than
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electro-mechanical switches and relays. This made it fully electronic and
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therefore much quicker and with greater combinatorial range.
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This was the insight of
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[Tommy Flowers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers) (a working class
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hero if ever there was), who designed and built it. He proposed using
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vacuum-tubes from his experience with telephony at the Post Office Research
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Station. This was met with scepticism and at one point he resorted to using his
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own money (never properly remunerated) to build it. He was vindicated. Not only
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did the machine prove critical in the final stages of the War (confirming the
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Nazis had bought the D-Day deception), it proved the speed and viability of
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purely-electronic components that would ultimately lead to the transistor and
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integrated circuit in later decades.
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The next day we went to the National Museum of Computing which is unaffiliated
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with Bletchley but located on the same site.
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This was a different experience. Certainly less polished and perhaps a bit
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forbidding for those not already well versed in computer lore.
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This said, it had it's own scruffy charm and is clearly a labour of love. During
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our visit there were OG volunteer computer engineers actively working on the
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reconstructions.
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It was a complete cornicopia of retro computers and we had a high time
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marvelling at the sheer amount of beige and retro-futurist design.
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Here are some of my highlights...
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