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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Actually the name of the bombe, is polish for ice cream. and the reason for the name is that is what they were eating when they meet the polish who gave urring the first enigma engine we got just before the german invasion. I have a nice final year thesis i did on crypto histoty detailing this kind of thing.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The staff at Bletchley said they'd been told the "bomba" version by visiting Poles, and mentioned the ice-cream story as a discarded theory.

[lnr]

That's certainly another of the theories that was mentioned yes (an icecream bombe is a dessert in several languages, not just Polish though). The guide who told the version Richard mentions said he'd heard it from some Polish visitors, who were obviously either convinced that was the real reason or very good at pulling the wool over people's eyes. (Either that or the guide was).

Definitely a good day out though, and I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't been. I'd certainly like to go back and see more at some point.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Nice to hear more recommendations for this - my parents visited recently and were raving about how we should definitely go. We haven't got round to it yet but it does sound like fun.