Many congrats to all involved

A remarkable job. I visited BP when I was last in the UK, it's a very worthwhile visit, and remarkable that it has been preserved.

For those in the US, the NCR version of the Bombe is available for your viewing pleasure (though behind a glass shield) at the NSA Museum in Maryland.

Mine's the one with the Enigma rotor in the pocket

Cut the red wire!

No seriously was red on discount or something?

...to add to my computer collection!

...can it run Crysis at full?

tell me next weeks lotto numbers?

but seriously fantastic work to those involved would hate to see such a excellent example of british boffinrey go to waste especially since it helped in ze war

How accurate a replica is it then; what HW does it have running hidden away under all that wiring & what OS is it running?

Seriously though - a job well done.

...more like, will it run Wolfenstein 3D?

Hats off to all concerned.

If it can, that'll be a Bombe Surprise......

Seems that no thread about Bletchley Park is complete without the web address for donations to help support their work, and more information on the BP site:

http://www.bletchleypark.org/

They accept PayPal or WorldPay, top right hand corner of the home page, so no excuses now...

...a Beowulf Cluster of these.

There is no gift shop, no post cards for sale and you check all video and sound recording equipment at the door.

"Thank you for your cooperation."

"We hope you enjoy your visit, but if asked later we will deny all knowledge of it."

If you go to BP and do the tour, you will hear that the valves were acquired every time a BT exchange was upgraded .... BT would tell them and they'd go and pillage the exchange. I believe that Bletchley Park have enough in stock for a number of decades

When they turn it on it will probably declare war on Germany and then fall over with a BSOD.

Only joking - great stuff and well done to all involved!

I though the Poles invented the Bombe and smuggled it to UK during the war

There's only a bloomin' German frigate moored next to HMS Belfast! I suggest we all start running Enigma@Home pretty damned sharpish to prevent such a thing occurring again.

Where did they get the valves from? Same place that sells CV joints for BMWs and distributor caps for Citroën 2CVs, probably.

Have we milked the car analogy to death yet?

No love for Tommy Flowers, then? ...just kidding.

I'm always amused that our friends across the pond call vacuum tubes "valves." It's an apt description for what they do, sure, but it sounds very steampunk-y to my ears.

"I bought an old valve radio at the boot sale!"

"Well, fire up the boiler and tune in Radio 2, then."

Another punch to the lunch from that bunch. Well Done!

>I'm always amused that our friends across the pond call vacuum tubes "valves."

Because they are a valve - they control the flow of electrical current like a valve does any other flow. What's does calling it a tube tell you?

Of course what do you expect from a country that calls a sport where you carry an egg shaped object in your hand 'football' instead of 'handegg'

amanfromMars actually made semantic sense....

/me ponders the implication that in some way someone has just divided by zero

Given the current financial crisis I'm sure HMG will do anything to shave costs, so maybe this little beast could help with the ID card database?

No, hang on. That'll be £3.50 for the computer, and £24.5m for EDS to lap it up in consultancy fees (and to reserve some spare slots on the board when ministers have got chucked out on their ear).

Paris because her valves need a bit of warming up. Allegedly.

"amanfromMars actually made semantic sense....

/me ponders the implication that in some way someone has just divided by zero" .... By NB Posted Monday 23rd March 2009 20:33 GMT

NB,

It would be naive of everybody to think that Top Secret works [which for generations will never be revealed or third party discovered] are something which would ever stop, given their necessity to counter Man's Inhumanity to Man and Endemic Systemic Madness in the Destructive Psychosis of the Psycopathic and Criminally and Hopelessly Insane.

But that is no dark secret ...... "Be careful Paul," she told him, he claimed today. "There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge." ..... http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-94019717.html

Now that is an observation and a submission from one extremely smart lady, who would have such powers of which she would have no knowledge working in this country, at her Service .... OHMSIS. And should she feel/find that that is not the official case, then the Royal Household is Deficient and in Deficit of a Vital Organ of Right Regal Administration..... which would be an Indication of Tired Outdated Advice and Sub-Prime Performance.

"one of the best ways to find the settings for a given day was to find out which settings were impossible - that's what the bombe does"

This approach appears to be still viable and is roughly what was done in the EFF DES cracker chips to demonstrate it could be broken by brute force (on average) in less than 31/2 days.

I would say the grand challenge in this area (for money) would be breaking the Sky Digital encryption. My cursory reading of this is that it was developed by one of the 3 principles behind RSA now based in Israel. However while DES was 56 bits this is 2048. The current official record for factoring large primes (a key component of this stuff) is IIRC 336 bits.

With enough storage one could archive their output and crack off line.

Not that I'm advocating such behaviour. Just pointing out an interesting challenge.