Bletchley Park

[ewx]

We spent the day at Bletchley Park, the site of Britain's WWII codebreaking efforts. Initially it looked like we were the youngest people there by several decades, but the balance of visitors improved a bit quite soon.

The tour took us around various parts of the site. Some of the props (e.g. the bombe) are actually left-overs from the film inspired by the goings-on there, but there's plenty of authentically old stuff - several Enigmas (one of which you can actually type on and see working for yourself), a couple of Lorentz machines (the 12-rotor machine used to encrypt messages within the German command staff), a couple of type X machines (British machines derived from the same origin as Enigma, and actually flexible enough to encode and decode Enigma messages) and large amounts of other stuff from the time.

There's also a bombe reconstruction project underway; they reckoned it needed at least two more years. Apparently the most-favoured theory on the origin of the name of these machines is that it derives from the Polish "bomba", meaning the same as "eureka". And of course there's the Collosus reconstruction project as well.

The whole place is scattered with other more-or-less relevant sub-museums, one of which is a computer museum, full of all sorts of stuff, much of it powered and usable.