Tunny Code-Breaker Rebuilt At Bletchley Park 47
Jack Spine writes "Engineers at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park have rebuilt the Tunny machine, a key device used in decoding German High Command messages during the Second World War. The Tunny machine took a team of three people three years to rebuild. At the end of the war, Tunny machines were broken up and the components recycled, while the original circuit diagrams were destroyed or hidden. The team had to piece together plans for the machine from odd pieces of circuit diagram that had been squirreled away by engineers, as well as from the recollections of some of the original builders."
Geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rather odd justification... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rather odd justification... (Score:2, Insightful)
I do applaud the team who spent many countless hours rebuilding such a machine, but I'm really curious as to the reasoning behind such an effort.
This is kind of like walking into an automobile museum and finding a replica of a Ford Model T, built with modern blended steels. It just isn't quite the same.
Except now imagine there were no existing Model Ts to use as a reference, no diagrams, no instructions on how to contruct it, the original machinery used to make the model T is all gone, and all you had to go off of was what they described, including people's memory from 70 years ago.
So yeah, just like it, except not...
Re:But why... (Score:5, Insightful)
A government's obsession with secrecy is not always a logical thing.
The thing your forgetting is that we didn't want any of our temporary allies to advance their code breaking tech on our backs. Since we had advanced in our tech they were obsolete but still valuable to other nations they were destroyed because we had no use for them but other countries may have. Lots of military grade electronics are repurposed or destroyed today for the exact same reason.