Bletchley Park

On Friday, June 23, the EIL students along with Profs. Berry and Parsons and Natalie Crown from IES visited Bletchley Park (north of London). Bletchley Park is where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma code during World War II.  The students witnessed demonstrations of working Bombe, Tunny, and Colossus machines and were given the opportunity to operate an actual Enigma machine. The Colossus was the world's first electric digital computer that was programmable. The Colossus computers were developed to help in the cryptanalysis of the Hitler's Lorenz cipher.  Our guides (Frank, Philip, and John) were excellent and Professor Berry was given three more vacuum tubes from the working Colossus machine (at the National Museum of Computing) for the display case in the Min Kao Building on the UT campus.