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."
Re:But why... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oddly enough, the American counterparts to Colossus were never destroyed. Instead these became prototypes of commercial computing equipment, built by the likes of IBM.
History is full of examples of technology, developed by the Allies (primarily the British) that was abandoned at home, but pursued by the USA for commercial gain. Radar and magnetrons, gas turbine engines, vacuum tube (as opposed to relay) logic, supersonic flight, to name a few. The Canadians development of a supersonic fighter/bomber industry was also stopped with the cancellation of the Arrow [wikipedia.org], possibly at the request of the USA military aircraft industry.