First report of the Bletchley Visit on 20 May 2004
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By tradition, the Oxfordshire Branch of the BCS rounds off its year's programme with a visit to a site of general interest. For 2004, we had arranged a trip to Bletchley Park.
On arrival at Bletchley Park we were greeted by Hugh Davies, who was to be our guide for the Day. An excellent guide he was too – combining a strong knowledge of codebreaking tools and techniques with many human insights into the personalities involved during the war.
We were treated to a brief history of codes and ciphers, starting with the simple Caesar cipher, up to the recent use of Welsh speakers by the British military in the Serbian conflict, on the assumption that Welsh is not much spoken in the Balkans. Hugh could also have mentioned the successful use of Navajo “Code-Talkers” by the Americans during the Second World War – which had proved to be completely unintelligible to and unbreakable by the Japanese. Hugh is the inventor of the password-lessPassface™ authentication system for which he was awarded a BCS Tecnhical Innovation prize.
Hugh paid tribute to the work of the Poles in the 1930s, who had given the Bletchley Park team a good start by providing captured material and wiring diagrams for Enigma machines.
Here is a Wren standing in front of a “Bombe”.
The bombe was designed by Alan Turing to simulate 12 Enigma machines, thus speeding up the search for a valid decrypt key out of 15.9X1018 possibilites.
This Wren was a very good model – keeping perfectly still for the photographer!
We saw John Harper, who is building a working replica of a Bombe, and Tony Sale with his reconstruction of the “Colossus”.
The Colossus was, if anything, a more impressive achievement than the Bombe, as it was built to decipher messages from the German Lorenz machine which was used by Hitler and his High Command. The Colossus was reverse-engineered from captured messages although the team had never seen, let alone had access to, the Lorenz machine which was creating the messages.
The party, several of whom were old enough to remember the ration books that were on display, finished the visit by enjoying a nostalgic wander round ancient equipment in the Computer Museum.
Further photos of the day are listed below.
Here is a short selection of some of the many websites with further information:
BcsOxonWiki: BletchleyVisit ...
Hugh
