Tag archive: Bletchley Park

The United Kingdom's National Museum of Computing has finished its laborious rebuild of a Tunny machine, a system that produced the final decryptions of intercepted Axis communiques during World War II. The Tunny machines—built by a team led by Bill Tutte—were an effort to re-engineer the Germans' Lorenz SZ42 cipher machines used in teleprinter communications. Unlike the famous Enigma machines, no Lorenz units were… Read More

Britain’s National Museum of Computing received a boost yesterday when tech companies IBM and PGP jointly gave $100,000 to help restore and curate exhibits. However, the museum is looking for a total of $14 million to secure its future. Bletchley Park, located not far from London, was the home of Colossus, believed to be the first computer, and used during World War II, and where the famous Enigma code was broken. Of the $14 million… Read More

They’d called it the Cipher Challenge. Could the rebuilt Colossus code breaker – an early computer – work faster than a virtual machine or someone using modern software?   Friday provided the answer, and it wasn’t great news for the machine originally built over 60 years ago. It was beaten both by a German amateur, Joachim Schuth, who’d written his own software for the project, and also by a ‘virtual… Read More