Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park is 85km north of London in Buckinghamshire was Britain’s main decryption establishment during WWII. Ciphers and codes of several Axis countries were decrypted including, most importantly, those generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines. The Enigma and Lorenz codes were supposed to be unbreakable even by someone in possession of the machine. Thanks to Graham Nice (incl. Lynn & Jennifer) for providing me accommodation, picking me up at Gatwick and touring me around — we all met up at Bletchley.

Click here to meet the Nice family (missing Jonathan who was on British Army maneuvers in Europe)

The first operational break into Enigma came around the 23 January 1940, when the team working under Dilly Knox, with the mathematicians John Jeffreys, Peter Twinn and Alan Turing, unravelled the German administrative key (code). Bletchley Park was a mansions but purchased by the government to house the codebreakers Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer, had a single purpose: to help decipher the Lorenz-encrypted (Tunny) messages between Hitler and his generals during World War II. Colossus: codebreaking hardware The National Museum of Computing is in close proximity to Bletchley Interesting early computing devices in the computer museum including this platter that frequently became coffee tables upon their retirement Museum of Computing — early backplane