Sunday 4 November 2012

The Colossus at Bletchley Park

The Colossus 
A few days ago I did what I have been meaning to do for years and visited Bletchly Park to see the rebuilt Colossus - the world's first programmable computer. The original was built during the Second World War to help decode encrypted German messages. The Germans used a Lorenz coding machine which had different setting and Colossus scanned a paper tape of messages to find out what setting was being used. The machine was deemed so secret that it was destroyed - but has now been rebuilt and the fully operational version is in the National Museum of Computing.

The Bombe
Also on display was The Bombe which was designed by Alan Turing which was an earlier electro-mechanical to tool used to break the German codes.

The purpose of the trip was mainly to look at the code-breaking work that had been carried out at Bletchley Park and and I plann to make another visit to be able to do justice to the National Museum of Computing.

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