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."
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www.tnmoc.org
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*intake of breath*
ARM - The processor architecture designer. If you've have a smartphone, any smartphone, there's a 90% chance there's an ARM designed chip or processor in there.
Pace - The largest Set Top Box manufacturer in the world
Sage - 3rd biggest enterprise resource software in the world
Symbian - First created by PSION software in the 90's.
Codemasters - Still churning out Colin McRae/DIRT racing games
Traveller's Tales - LEGO *insert film franchise* game developers
Splash Damage - Developers of Brink
Lio
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Richard Hammond .... is that you?
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*intake of breath*
Sage - 3rd biggest enterprise resource software in the world
Symbian - First created by PSION software in the 90's.
My wife loves her Symbian... wait... uh nevermind. Nothing to see here.
Geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
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It turns out it just makes soft serve ice cream and keeps printing out the number 42.
Shameless Wiki for more info (Score:5, Informative)
Get it from the horses mouth (Score:2)
http://www.tnmoc.org [tnmoc.org]
(sorry about double post - crap /. ui + n900 + train = fail)
Rather odd justification... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Rather odd justification... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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...
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Or like walking into a museum, and seeing a plaster replica of a T-Rex skeleton, which was reconstructed out of part of a skull and half a thigh bone (or whatever they had).
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Your T-Rex analogy is right on the money, but GP posed a *car* analogy. That means you have to counter with an *alternative car analogy*. It doesn't have to be a *good* one.
Sorry, I don't make the rules here, I just accept them uncritically, then mindlessly impose them upon others. Just like anyone else.
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Fine.
In 64 million years, when the dominent species creates a museum dedicated to the fossilised remains of cars (which they assume were the dominant species) ...
But why... (Score:1)
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Because the stuff might have been classified and/or they felt there was no need to keep the machines?
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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.
Because were it but for... (Score:1)
If no hint was given that those cipher systems had been broken, it could be plausibly hoped that other nations would adopt similar systems after the surrender of Nazi Germany, considering them secure. Sure enough, the Soviet Union soon cobbled together a similar system, probably inspired by captured equipment. One can only imagine the frisson of glee that ran through the cryptanalysts when they discovered they could re-apply techniques and breaks they had already honed against the Germans.
So, on the whole,
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What do you think the demand was for machines to break the ciphers of Nazi Germany after they surrendered?
There's no way that the machines were going to end up in a museum because the last thing the British government wanted was for the World to know how successful they were at cryptanalysis.
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.
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Apparently a number of German code systems kept on being used after WW2 (and by nations other than Germany). At least part of the Bletchley Park inventory ended up in GCHQ were the machines were used into the '70s.
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And the Soviet Union adopted a teleprinter encryption system loosely based on the Lorentz (Tunny) and Siemens Geheimschrieber. Needless to say, the Soviets wouldn’t have adopted that kind of technology if they had known it had already been broken during the war, and thus what was (presumably) a huge insight into the USSR’s secrets would have been lost.
Detailed drawings? (Score:3)
Does anybody know if they've put together/published a detailed set of drawings for this machine? Given how much work it was to create it and how cool/historically significant it is, it would be nice if the hardcore nerds among us could order copies of the detailed technical information.
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seriously though. These guys are what, 104 year old Germans?
This machine was built by Brits, to break the German codes.
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>
seriously though. These guys are what, 104 year old Germans?
Indeed. Because England's population 70 years ago was made up completely of Germans over the age of 34.
Now I'll have to visit Bletchley again (Score:2)
I've been there, but went on a weekday. The tour guide that day was more into the uninspired architecture of the manor house than the crypto gear.
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That's unfortunate. I've been a couple of times, and had a knowledgeable guide each time.
In winter, they have a small staff on weekdays, so not everything is open and you may get a dull guide. Weekends are better. Or go during the summer.
Check the BP website [bletchleypark.org.uk] for details.
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I went this year on 10 April and the guide was brilliant. He even answered some of the finer points of Dilly Knox’s diagonal board.
Not strictly a codebreaking machine (Score:2)
The Bletchley Park guys figured out how the Lorenz machines worked by decoding messages by hand. They then built the Tunny machines to emulate a Lorenz machine. The actual codebreaking was mostly done by a Heath Robinson machine (or later, a Colossus), this yielded the correct wheel settings. These settings were then entered in the Tunny machines, and these could be used to decrypt the day's Lorenz traffic.
I was at Bletchley Park last year and saw the Tunny exhibit. Didn't realize that they were still worki
Why? (Score:2)
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It’s simple: because it’s difficult... just because they almost couldn’t.