Hi Michael.
It seems that a society’s pursuit of an all-encompassing goal – winning a total war, landing a man on the moon – has always been an impetus for major technological advances.
I mentioned to you before we left New Zealand that St Albans is not far from Bletchley Park. As it was wet and cold last weekend, museums seemed a good option; Bletchley Park is a higgledy-piggledy jumble of them, so off we went.
Sir Herbert Leon bought the 235 ha site in 1883 and built a mansion in a strange mish-mash of neo-Gothic, Tudor and Dutch baroque architectural styles. Having run out of money, his descendants sold the park in 1938 to the Security Intelligence Service. In 1939 the Government Code and and Cypher School (the GC&CS, thereafter referred to as the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society) moved into the mansion. By 1945 the GC&CS employed 10,000 people, of whom 75% were women; their workplaces were spread throughout a maze of buildings, blocks, huts and outstations. Among them Maths and language graduates, expert crossword solvers, lateral thinkers, many of them oddball even famously eccentric characters, a remarkable group of intellects.
The mansion itself now illustrates what life was like in a highly secure and secretive environment. The huts that were spread throughout the grounds housed staff working on specific tasks. Best known, perhaps, is Hut 11, led by Alan Turing, which focussed on breaking the German naval Enigma code. There are several Enigma machines at Bletchley Park; with their black metal cases in wooden boxes, they are very handsome machines. Hut 11 also houses a working replica of the Bombe, the code-cracking machine developed by Turing and Welchman. The museum staff run it hourly – it clicks, clatters and clanks along, but is also an admirable invention.
The huts must have been uncomfortable work environments: poor heating, dim lighting, blacked-out windows, cramped quarters, bare sticks of furniture, and cigarette smoke in addition to the noise of four Bombes. I felt the utmost admiration for the people who worked in such difficult conditions, producing highly inventive solutions to fiendishly complex problems. The British military believe that the work of Bletchley Park may have shortened the war by two years and saved up to 20,000 lives.
Block H in the park was re-opened in 2007 as the National Museum of Computing and now houses a fully working model of Colossus, the first electronic semi-programmable computer, which was built to crack the German Lorenz encoding machine.
Turing was not directly involved in the development of Colossus: it was designed by Max Newman and built by Tommy Flowers. I imagine, though, that Turing’s pre-war theoretical work on the Universal Machine and the ‘stored program’ concept served as a foundation for its development. Newman became the Professor of Mathematics at Manchester University after the war where he and his team developed an electronic stored program computer – the Manchester ‘Baby’ which first ran in 1948. And the rest is, literally, history.
That history is stored in the National Museum of Computing; it contains examples of computers from that time to the present day. There is a room full of mainframes from the 1960s: they look clunky and rudimentary now, but it was awe-striking to be reminded that they put a man on the moon in 1969. Then we found those machines which we first used ourselves: the Apple IIe, the Acorn (there was a room full of them at Selwyn College in 1982), and the Mac Classic (the first computer we owned and on which I was writing my Masters thesis when you were born), and so on…
On reflection, it may well be that the computer, along with the internet, will be regarded as the greatest life-changing invention of my life time. I had never seen its history displayed from its origins in the Second World War to the everyday tool of my later working life.
By the way, there is a website built by the first curator of the Bletchley Park museums, Tony Sale, which enables you to decypher messages and solve problems using an online version of the Colossus. It is worth exploring: www.codesandcyphers.org.uk
I greatly enjoyed our visit to Bletchley Park. As we drove back to St Albans, I realised that the heart of the park is not the mansion; it is the history of the development of the computer, which also coincides with my own life time.
I hope you are enjoying working with the tools of your trade,
Malcolm
