brainwagon

Carmen and I just got back from a trip to London, and we had a blast. One of the geekiest things we did while there was to take a day trip by train out to Bletchley Park to see the site of the codebreaking efforts by the British during WWII. As any long time reader of this blog must know, I’m pretty interested in codes and cryptography, and this was a bit of a personal thrill for me.

While we were there, we managed to get demonstrations of a real Enigma machine (very cool) and the modern reconstruction they completed of the Turing Bombe. I shot some video of it using a Canon G11, which isn’t all that great (the sound in particular is pretty terrible) but I thought I’d archive it on YouTube in case anyone else found it of interest. If you get the chance to go to Bletchley, I heartily recommend it: we spent four hours there, and it really wasn’t enough. Besides the Enigma and the Bombe, they have a reconstruction of Colossus, the first electronic digital computer that was used to break the German teleprinter code that the British called “Tunney”. They also have huts filled with many artifacts of the period, including one containing a bunch of radio equipment, dating all the way back to the crystal sets of the 1910s and 1920s to the Piccolo secure modem transceivers that were used in British embassies well past the war. Nifty stuff.

I have some pictures that I’ll get onto Picasa sometime soon of related nifty topics.