Bletchley Park

On Friday, June 23, the EIL students along with Profs. Berry and Parsons and Emily Brown 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, Harwell Dekatron, 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.  Nicknamed WITCH for Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell, the Harwell Dekatron at the National Museum of Computing is considered the oldest electronic computer that is still operational. Our guides (Sheridan, John, and Tom) were excellent and Professor Berry was given another vacuum tube and tape samples from the working Colossus machine for the display case in the Min Kao Building on the UT campus.