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Image of the day – 155
What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.
Why is this old computer enigmatic? Some of you will know, some might guess correctly, others may have no idea. I took the photo in July 2012 at the Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where highly secret work was done during the Second World War to break the German Enigma code as well as other enemy codes and ciphers.
This is a working replica of the famous Colossus computers used to crack those very difficult codes. And computer power alone couldn’t do it, it required clever minds to look for little hints that could make the ‘unbreakable’ code breakable. As an example, once it was realised that a letter could be coded as any letter other than itself, even this tiny clue could help point the cryptographers in the right direction. And there were always cribs that could help, the knowlege that a particular operator always began with the same phrase was an enormous help.
No original Colossus machines exist, after the war ended, Churchill gave strict orders that they should all be dismantled and the parts broken into small pieces.
The idea behind Colossus was the brainwave of Alan Turing, a mathematical genius who worked at Bletchly Park during the war. The Bombe that preceded it was originally designed and built by Polish engineers. Turing and his team designed and built a British version, physically different but doing the same job.
CSO (then based at Bletchly, now at GCHQ) intercepted the coded messages, while teams produced the German plain text, translated it into English and passed it to the British government and military planners.
See also:
- Alan Turing – Wikipedia
- Alan Turing Decoded (Biography) – Wikipedia
- Bletchley Park – Website
- Bletchley Park – Wikipedia
- Bombe – Wikipedia
- Chris Shore lecture on Colossus – YouTube
- Colossus computer – Wikipedia
- Enigma machine – Wikipedia
- Enigma 2001 (search) – YouTube
- Enigma (2001 film) – Wikipedia
- Enigma (novel by Robert Harris) – Wikipedia
- GCHQ – Website
- GCHQ – Wikipedia
- National Museum of Computing – Website
- National Museum of Computing – Wikipedia
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