Bletchley rebooted: The crypto factory time remembered

Went there for the first time this summer.

Fantastic day out (and is a 'proper' day out). We were there for almost 6 hours.

What particularly stood out for me is how appallingly Turing was treated after the war (thankfully there is a letter of apology from Gordon Brown).

It'a also worth noting you have to pay extra to see Colossus and go into the TMNOC but it's worth it. Great to see the old mainframes.

so that Britain could send out a pair of Supermarine Spitfires to sink it.

What a complete load of bollocks, as if they would send a couple of Spitfires. It took 3 heavy cruisers, four destroyers and 14 Fairey Swordfish to sink her.

“from then-neutral North America”

Gavin, on behalf of my northern neighbours, I’ll point out that Canada declared war on Germany on 10th September 1939. Did you (or the guide) mean “from the then-neutral USA”?

Also, s/Furher/Führer/ — it ain’t V-2 science.

A little more history is in order.

The Bomba was not invented out of whole cloth by Turing. It was an improvement on the Polish Bomba Kryptologiczna created circa 1938 by mathematician and cryptologist Marian Rejewski who had broken the Enigma code after recognizing that the trigram rotator setting was repeated at the beginning of each message (apparently the German high command didn't bother to follow the directions). Initially Rejweski and his staff ran through the calculations by hand to decipher the codes, but with improvements to the Enigma and a desire to decrypt faster Rejewski built the Bomba to streamline the computational process. As the political relationship with the Germans deteriorated Poland attempted to give the information to the French, but they decided that they were safe because they had a line of forts across Europe and the Germans couldn't possibly do anything to them (except drive right past on their way for Paris). Eventually the British accepted Rejewski's research and then promptly locked out of the continuing research and left it to Turing and the rest at Bletchley to build on his work.

Rejewski has been shorted far too often by Bletchley and at some point they really should give him the credit that he deserves. Without his pioneering work it is doubtful that Turing and the rest would have had a foundation to build upon.