National Museum of Computing

The last place we went to tour during the British Studies program was the National Museum of Computing. I had no real previous information about this museum, but other student filled me in that this is the location where they broke codes during World War II and the blockbuster film The Imitation Game is loosely based on the code breaking that occurred here. 

This image shows the actual location that the code breaking occurred. 

            The museum is separate from the actual location that the code breaking occurred during WWII, the picture above shows the actual location. The museum is in a separate building in Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire. They officially opened their doors in 2007, and they house a large collection of vintage computers. They also have a collection of replica computers that they rebuilt for the museum. 

The Lorenz teleprinter 

            The first machine that was introduced during our tour was the Lorenz teleprinter. The teleprinter shown above was used by the Germans to encrypt messages that were sent over the radio. The first thing that was done on the machine was set it to a specific key, then the key was sent over to the recipient of the message who also had the same machine. Both machine were then set to the same key, to send and or decrypt the message. Without the key it was virtually impossible to decrypt the message, since it just looked like a long string of random numbers and letters. The mistake the German made, were that sometime they would resend the same key over the radio. This allowed the code breakers to identify a pattern, and later break the code. What interesting is that this same machine was used up until the 80's!

A rebuilt Colossus Computer. 

          Another interesting thing I learned during the tour is that many of the computers were not originals, instead they were rebuilt versions. The Colossus computer was one of them. The original was built by a British codebreaker sometime from 1943-45 and it played a key role in decrypting codes from the Lorenz machine. It worked by looking for patterns in intercepted radio calls from the Germans. What was interesting to learn is that there was no real internal storage system, instead it had an output of information on two reels of paper that were then read.  

           Besides codebreaking machines and computers the National Museum of Computing also housed a large number of vintage computers. The image above shows one of the first available computers for home use from the 1950's. What I found interesting is that it is incredibly large! It hardly resembles a computer at all, instead it just looks like a large (and heavy) storage cabinet. Its also incredible to think about how far computers have gotten in such a short amount of time. I wonder where they will be 50 more years from now?

Source:

https://www.tnmoc.org/