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Encryption Security

BT funds UK Crypto Heritage Park 66

Posted by Hemos from the bt-can-do-something-right dept.
evilandi writes "Bletchley Park, "home of the WW2 codebreakers and [allegedly!] the world's first electronic programmable computer" (Colossus I), has been saved following this deal with British Telecom. The historic site will be converted into part museum, part conference centre and part education resource- all specifically crypto oriented. WW2 hacker HQ "D-Block" (the precursor to GCHQ) will be restored along with the lovely grounds and manor house. "
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BT funds UK Crypto Heritage Park More

BT funds UK Crypto Heritage Park

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  • Re:Funny, though (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wasn't the sub a German sub? The ship was that captured it was the HMS Bulldog, which was escorting a convoy from Canada to England.
  • I finished it a few days ago. Man, it was a great read, but I feel like I need to read it again. Fortunately it's long enough to where you could just start at page 1 again and feel like you're reading a new book (coz you've forgotten the beginning by the time you get to the end).

    Is Cryptonomicon a Strange Loop?

    :)

  • ENIAC (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by _DogShu_:

    I thought ENIAC was the first electronic programmable computer. That's what they told me in my CompSci classes.

  • I wonder how many people know the story of Alan Turing, inventor of the first computer (arguably), and the field of Artificial Intelligence? This was one of the main guys that cracked the Enigma code. Winston Churchill said of Alan Turing "I wouldn't say he won the war for us, but I dare say we would have lost it without him"!
    Strange then that not long after that he was convicted of being a homosexual and killed himself after being forced to take oestrogen (the female sex hormone) by the government.

    --

  • There were two types of code, the first, what was actually "Enigma" was indeed known publicly to be vulnerable in the 1970s, however the more sophisticated version, known as "fish" was not known to be crackable at the time. I assume "fish" was the code that the Irish were using.

    --

  • Why keep it a secret? (Score:3)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Thursday June 10, 1999 @05:04AM (#1857408) Homepage Journal
    I'll tell you why - so that the British government could sell the Enigma encryption algorithm to other countries and then spy on them! I reacall hearing somewhere that as recently as 1985, prior to the signing of the Anglo-Irish agreement (an agreement designed to rob the IRA of some of its excuses for causing trouble, but which was a bit of a failure) the British could read all correspondance between the London Irish Embassy and Dublin. How? Because the Irish were using the Enigma code which had been sold to them by the British, and nobody outside British and American intelligence knew that it had been cracked! Apparently the rights to the Enigma code were given to the British as compensation for WW2, what else would you do with a broken encryption code, if not sell it!

    --

  • I think that you are thinking of Konrad Zuse. He built an electromechnical (relays) binary computer. (Several others later)

    The German military saw no use for it, however...

    The Manachester "Baby" was the first stored program computer (it used CRTs for memory!). ENIAC was programmed by wiring. EDSAC used a mercury delay line for memory (bits were stored as ultrasonic pulses which travelled down a trough of Hg).

    The Web is very rich in historical details, if you want to search.

    On Zuse:

    http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/courses/CS110/Histor y/KonradZuse.html

    On the analytical engine (The FIRST computer ;-) ), C. Babbage:

    http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/

    General computer museum:

    http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums /computing.html

  • >I thought ENIAC was the first electronic
    >programmable computer. That's what they told me
    >in my CompSci classes.

    It's a debatable point, and seems to hinge on the definition of "programmable". The ENIAC was programmable, but didn't store its program internally. Manchester Baby was the first "stored program" machine. For my money, that makes it the first computer. But then I would say that, being a Brit ;)

  • "Bletch" or "Blatch" is an old Saxon word meaning "bleach", as in to remove colour, to wash clean or to colour white.

    "Ley", "Lee" or "Lay" means a field or a clearing in a forest. Remember, in Saxon times, most of Europe was one huge forest so most fields were also clearings! No prizes for guessing what my surname (Oakley) means, then.

    Thus "Bletchley" means the field where people washed their clothes. Maybe one of your ancestors lived near such a field, or was a washerman there, or owned a dark ages launderette business!

    The Bletchley family have quite an aristocratic heritage in England, which includes residence at Bletchley Park (he says quickly getting back on topic).

    If you ancestors changed their name from Bletchley to something else on arrival in the USA, it is possible they were trying to dissasociate themselves with the aristocratic branch of the family (Were they criminals, was their family ashamed of them? Did the aristocrats have a bad reputation as cruel landowners? Or were they, like the majority, merely illiterate and unable to spell their name? Etc.). You can find out more from virtually any geneology site (there are millions) and there are several famous Bletchleys in the history books.

    --

  • Okay, the reason I put the word "allegedly" into my story quote is because I expected there to be some considerable disagreement about which was the "first" computer. Particularly since Germany, France, the UK and the USA all claim this honour (plus a few others I expect).

    The problem is: what is a computer? Do you mean a calculator? So does an abacus count? Something that runs a program? So does a weaving loom count? Something electronic that runs a program? So does a washing machine count? Something digital? Something that has a modifyable program? Something that stores its program in the same way as its data?

    As you can see, there are many definitions of "computer". Stop bickering!

    And to add to that, early computers were often an international effort. Certianly Bletchley Park relied heavily on US involvement towards the end of the war.

    That doesn't detract from the fact that Bletchley Park was a major contributor to both cryptography and modern computing.

    Anyway, here's a few more British historical computing links for those who like nostaligia. If anyone would like to add some links to sites about other historical computers- of any nation- I'd be most interested.

    Colossus I [bletchleypark.org.uk]
    The LEO - Lyons Electric Office [man.ac.uk] (my dad worked on this)
    The WITCH [wlv.ac.uk] (my dad worked on this, too!)
    The Baby [computer50.org]

    --

  • Bletchley is the name of a town, that Bletchley park is in. The town is now part of the new city of Milton Keynes (where I live). If you've got a UK map handy, that's supposedly central in the UK - about halfway between London and Birmingham...

    I don't know where the name of the town comes from, sorry...

    Do you know what the really sad thing is? I have lived in this area for nearly 10 years now, and Bletchley Park has an open day at least once a month - and I have never been there... I feel so guilty :)

    On the plus side, I have contributed cash to the Alan Turing memorial fund, which is building a statue of the great man himself...

    Regards,
    Denny

  • Re:ENIAC (Score:1)

    by AMK ( 3114 )
    A while back I heard about a workshop held by DARPA on alternative computers. I think DARPA's interest stems from environments where electronic computers are unsuitable -- high radiation environments where electronics would be unreliable, for example. Alternatives might be optical, mechanical, or hydraulic computers. Mechanical and hydraulic computers would almost certainly still be implemented as microstructures on silicon.
  • Much of the material on Colossus was classified for a long time (I recall reading that some of it is still classified today).

    Colossus was developed to break the Enigma ciphers used by the German navy and airforce; this was earlier in the war than the Manhattan project which gave birth to ENIAC. The first breaks were done with special-purpose machines (the "bombs"); more refined versions of the ciphers were broken later by Colossus, which was (more?) general purpose.

    I don't have my copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma (of Intelligence) by Andrew Hodges handy, but I recall it dates the majority of Turing's Bletchley park in 1941-43.

  • Did you get to go on Mr. Turing's Wild Ride?
  • ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer. Colossus was specific to code-breaking. I'd previously read that the Atanosoff-Berry Computer [ameslab.gov] (ca.1939) (see also the links from that page, and this page [ameslab.gov]) was the first programmable electronic computer, and it was specialized for solving linear systems of floating-point equations (at a whopping 3.75 flops). The designers wanted to be able to input & output as fast as the machine could support it, so they abandoned mechanical card readers & writers. Instead, they read cards by passing them under an electric field and measuring the disturbances in the field made by the holes. The wrote to the cards by using a 5kV spark to burn holes into the cards.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • There are other contenders for "first" computer, going back to the 30's, but that's not really my area of interest, so I haven't paid much attention to them, I'm afraid.

    Anyway, here's a few more British historical computing links for those who like nostaligia. If anyone would like to add some links to sites about other historical computers- of any nation- I'd be most interested.
    Here are a few more links that you may find of interest:

    There are plenty more, but those should give you enough to get started, and each has lots of links to explore.

  • Although I don't know this for sure - most old English country mansions like Bletchley were named after the family who first built them.

    You can search the UK phone directory for 'bletchley' here [bt.com], but you'll need to do it region by region. :(



  • Re:ENIAC (Score:1)

    by mpk ( 10222 )
    The definition of "first computer" is a vague one, and should really be divided into two, at least.

    The first true electronic stored-program computer (a computer which doesn't require rewiring to reprogram it) was the Manchester Mark 1, in 1948. It could be said that this was the first "true" computer, as earlier machines had programs hardwired or plugged and were not easily reprogrammable in this way.

    ENIAC was completed in late 1945, while the first production Colossus was completed in December 1943. It's as much a case of ideology (or patriotism) whether the prize for "first digital computer" should go to the British or American machine - and they weren't the only countries working on such things at that time, either.

    What usually happens in these cases is that the definitions are redefined each time they're used
    depending on who you want to win. The term "first computer" never seems to get used without some proviso or another - "first computer with a grey front panel, black pushbuttons and nifty flashing lights"...

    Hell, there's almost as much confusion about the first computer as there is about the first use of the term "bug" in a computing context..
  • ...now when's someone gonna design a Quake "Bletchley Park" Deathmatch level? ;-)
  • I think though that the first working digital computer goes to a german blokey in the late 30's. Part mechanical I think.

    Hmm... Babbage's computer was digital, it was also pretty much ALL mechanical... not to make a petty point, but...
  • they tryed to sell it but there where lots of nice trees that they could not cut down so had to give it over to the people

    and yes it was the first computer and the US did not help but where helped by it

    the reason why histroy books are wrong is that it was all so very hush hush

    everything was destroyed

    hmmm apples are nice

    a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
  • Fantastic news! Last week there was a lot of speculation in the British media that BillG was going to 'save' it by funding some restoration and building an MS 'campus' on some of the land. That would have been a real insult to the achievements of Bletchley Park and the role of military intelligence in the defeat of the Axis.
  • The Atanosoff-Berry Computer [ameslab.gov] had the first use of rotating drum memory, bit serial computation, parallel computation. It was also the first computing device to be all electronic in it's core. Instead of using relays, like devices before it, it used vacume tubes. Vacume tubes were natoriously inaccurate when trying to work with analog voltages, but they were perfect at being able to quickly and reliably switch between on/off states.

    Where did the recreation end up. I know the only part left from the original was (maby still is) in the lobby of the Physics building at Iowa State university.

  • Something kind of petty that I found interesting was that I now have some images to go with what I read in Cryptonomicon.
  • Speaking of the first stored-program computer, turns out I have a connection to it I didn't know about. It turns out that both Tom Kilburn [computer50.org] and Freddie Williams [computer50.org], who built the Mark I, worked (and first met) at TRE, the Telecommunications Research Establishment (actually, they did radar research) in Malvern [dra.hmg.gb]. Which happens to be where my parents worked (and first met) during the same period, my dad also doing radar research.

    I guess I come from a long line of nerds :-)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The key, surely, is that the data and the program
    are stored in much the same way. Thusly you can
    compute what/how you want to compute. Whether
    Colussus did this, I have no idea.
  • Does anyone know where the word Bletchley comes from in Bletchley park? It is very similar to my last name, and my ancestors came from England about 250 years ago and changed our name (to "Blachly"). Even now there are less than 400 Blachlys in the United States (according to the Census beurau(sp)), and looking through historical records (you know those giant books that list every last name in the world supposedly, and tell its history) "Blachly" isn't in there. I think my surname was at one time "Blachleigh" "Blatchley" or "Bletchley" and I'm attempting (not very successfully, I am busy with college :) to investigate the history.

    Thanks if anyone happens to know anything.
  • The Colossus was designed by Tommy Flowers (who died late last year) from the Post Office Research Department. This department is now British Telecom Research Labs based in Ipswich.
    So why do I (working ( allegedly :) ) at BT Labs) hear this first on /. ???
    Oh well. Hooray for us anyway!
    The BBC [bbc.co.uk] have a write up that claims Ian Flemming was there for a time as well.

  • I visited there earlier at the instigation of my Computer Science teacher and found it very interesting. Perhaps because I also study history. Shortly afterwards, one of the codebreakers actually came to my college to give a talk.

    So, I very pleased to here it will be "saved".

    I am less pleased that it is BT, since as a .uk internet addict I naturally hate BT for their per/minute billing which leads to horrendous phone bills.

    You may remember www.telecom.eu.org, www.unmetered.org.uk and other campaigns for unmetered calls ;)
  • 'The Cassini Division' by Ken McLeod is set in a future solar system where a virus has rendered all digital computers difficult or dangerous to use, so what computing there is is done by Babbage machines of varying sizes ranging from huge to nano. I'd never thought of it until I read it.

  • What year was the ENIAC? I think it was after the end of the war.

    I think that whilst the Brit computer might have been the first of it's kind.... but ENIAC might do things better.

    There is also the Manchester mark I.

    I think though that the first working digital computer goes to a german blokey in the late 30's. Part mechanical I think... but he got no recognition because of the war.

  • Babage didn't 'build' either of him machines.

    Only the difference engine has been build a proved to work. (I have seen it at the museam doing power series)

    His analytical engine should work but unlike the German bloke he never lived to try it.
  • Well, the brits always seem to get short shrift for their contributions to early computers. Among other things, if I remember correctly, was the invention of subroutines and function libraries.
  • >Funny thing is, if this were to happen in the US, the whole place would be bulldozed under
    >and replaced with the Bletchley Memorial Shopping Center

    Or only US citizens would be allowed full access, other people would only be allowed access to 56 acres of the ground, and people from Iraq would be refused entry. :)

    Seriously, I've been to Bletchley Park, and it's a interesting sight for those that are interested in crypo, or computers in general (They had a computer archive room when I was there, everything from 8" floppys, shells of PDP, ah memories :)

    They also had a mockup of the original collusus, and thankfully they also had a lot of praise for the people that worked there, and didn't just say, "the computer did it". The sense of history was immense, seeing the actual rooms where the cracking was done, was awesome.

    Although, my favourite part of the time I was there was when they had a flyover from a bomber, and a hurricane at about 200 ft - very impressive! :)

    --
  • The Colossus WAS the first single-purpose electronic computer built in Britain, 1943. ENIAC however was the first fully functioning machine to use binary. Other claimants include the German Z-3, built be Konrad Zuse in 1941.

    The work undertaken at Bletchely Park was integral to the timely end of WWII. Code name was Ultra. The main task was to simulate a captured German Enigma machine by cracking the Enigma code which Germany transmitted in apparent secrecy thoughout h te war. Enigma had been patented in WW1 to encipher and decipher messages, and was used in civilian life in the interwar years. The Colossus Project entailed highly classified work whose scale and implications were not revealed until thirty years after the war. It was an enormous undertaking, commanding the attentions of a large number of mathematicians, linguists, as well as whole troops of technicians.

    In many ways the tribute is a double banger in that it memorialises not just the birth of the application of computers in industrialised society, but also our freedom.

    Yippee!

  • The NSA Crypto Museum and memorial park at Ft. George Meade, MD, USA?

    BTW, they have really kewell NSA shirts and stuff at the gift shop.
  • The play Breaking the Code by Lewis(?) Whitehead is based on Turing's life. Derek Jacobi's portrayal of Turing is supposed to be one of the great moments of British theatre. (Jacobi also played Claudius in "I, Claudius", Brother Cadfael in "Cadfael" and Claudius in Kenneth Branuagh's "Hamlet.") I read an article a few weeks ago on BBConline that efforts to raise money to build a memorial to Turing were failing miserably. Any word on that effort? I presume it's related to the Bletchly Park museum.
  • You really think I'm going to give even a penny to the NSA, don't you? :)

    I wonder if the NSA Museum has a "trophy hall" of busted crypto-buffs... I bet the Export Law wing is pretty cool too!

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • The idea was to use a captured German bomber, crewed by German speaking British special forces, which would crash into the channel after sending a distress call. When a rescue boat (which had an Enigma and codebooks on board) arrived, the 'bomber crew' would overpower the crew, and sail back to Blighty.

    That would have been stupid, too. If the British had seized codebooks, one-time pads and a working Enigma machine, the Germans would have switched the codes in no time flat.

    It was much better to break Enigma and never tell the Germans about it, which is what they did.

    A more Bond-esque plot would have been to screw Hitler's wife. :)

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • Well! I know where I'm going on my next visit to the UK! This is so cool...

    By the way, I found this nifty link on Bletchley Park's site. It's a Java simulation of the Enigma machine (the rotor cipher scheme used by Germans in WW2.) It's really cool and educative.

    http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rus sell/classes/enigma/ [jhu.edu]

    I think I'm gonna devote some time to this... Have a friend encipher a few messages, then try a few modern attacks. It's nice to see how far we've come in crypto since WW2. Though I bet Enigma is still a pain to break on your own.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • Yep, a German sub, U-110. Forthcoming film is called U-110, and changes the ship from Bulldog to some American frigate.

    I'll put money on the film making a really big deal of the machine itself, which was largely irrelevant by that time, and entirely ignoring the codebooks, which were the real prize for the cryptographers.
  • Apart from the fact that the secret was out by the 1970's (of Enigma at least; Colossus lasted until about '91), why on earth would the Irish Embassy be using Enigma in 1985? It was useful as a tactical military code, as the machines were portable, but even in WWII there were better alternatives (like the Lorenz and Siemens teletype machines used by the German high command, which were broken by Colossus).

    I can believe the British were cracking whatever code the Irish were using, but I'd be stunned if it was Enigma.

    --
  • Fleming was indeed there; he came up with a plan to grab Enigma codebooks that would have done Bond proud.

    The idea was to use a captured German bomber, crewed by German speaking British special forces, which would crash into the channel after sending a distress call. When a rescue boat (which had an Enigma and codebooks on board) arrived, the 'bomber crew' would overpower the crew, and sail back to Blighty.

    I believe it even got so far as having a crew ready to go, but unsatisfactory weather conditions prevented the plan being used.

    --
  • One of the main points of the Enigma was that it didn't matter if the enemy had the exact machine if they didn't have the settings (which was fortunate for them, what with the British having working Enigma analogues from the Poles before the war).

    As for the codebooks (or lists of settings), if the Germans were aware they'd been captured, then they would have changed them. As it was, settings were recovered from a number of sources, a favourite being weather ships. As long as the Germans believed the ships were sunk rather than captured, the codes wouldn't change.

    There were a few incidents which dropped really heavy hints that Enigma had been cracked. The most notable was when all the supply ships for the Bismarck were sunk (accidentally; knowing that to sink all of them would look suspicious the Admiralty didn't target two of the ships, but they were coincidentally found and sunk anyway). Then, and every other time, the Germans refused to believe that Enigma could be cracked, and came up with other explanations.

    True, a more Bond-esque plot would have been to parachute an agent into Berlin to get captured and left to be killed in a particularly imaginative way, only to be rescued at the last minute by Eva Braun who'd fallen hopelessly in love with him. Maybe Fleming was just working up to that...

    --
  • The Allies used various codes; many of them were still based on fairly traditional codebooks, and the Germans (B-dienst?) had considerable success against them.

    The Allies also had a machine code very similar to Enigma called TypeX (so similar that TypeX machines could be converted to be used as Enigma analogues). One of the main differences between the machines was that the TypeX printed decoded messages on strips of paper, whereas the Enigma only had an alphabet on which each letter would light up as it decoded.

    --
  • Just to be pedantic (well, you've got to have a hobby).

    Enigma was a code machine, "Fish" was a generic name assigned by the British to German teletype based codes (the actualy machines being the Lorenz Schlusselzusatz SZ40 and 42 used by the army, codenamed "Tunny", and the Siemens T52 Geheimscreiber used by the Luftwaffe, codenamed "Sturgeon"). Colossus was used on the Lorenz machine, as Bletchley already had considerable success against Luftwaffe Engima keys.

    After the war, all the Colossi were destroyed, which makes postwar Fish cracking somewhat unlikely. I suppose machines similar to Colossus could have been constructed after the war in even greater secrecy, but the Fish machines would have been seriously dated by the 60s, let alone the 80s, making them somewhat curious choices for a government (though a better choice than Enigmas).

    --
  • Big difference between the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. The Difference Engine was possible (and, IIRC, a small scale one was produced in Babbages lifetime). The Analytical Engine was vastly more complex; Babbage kept having to design the tools to produce the parts he wanted. Babbage didn't help himself by periodically coming up with new ideas which rendered all his previous work obsolete, and effectively bankrupted himself.

    --
  • Well, according to Iowa State's alumni publications, the replica is eventually going to (or may already be at) the Smithsonian. It also toured Iowa for a time. Check out http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/ for pictures and more info.

    Glad to hear that they've put the remnant (a capacitor storage drum, IIRC) in a place where it can be seen. Back when I was a student there (81-87), the drum was in the office of the director of the Computation Center in the old CS building.
  • I believe the house was owned by the Levy family.

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