Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |
Subject: Dead Media Working Note 10.6
Dead medium: the Bletchley Park Colossus
From: bruces_AT_well.com (Bruce Sterling)
(((Through happy accident I have found an eyewitness
account of the newly resurrected Bletchley Park Colossus,
as mentioned in Working Note 10.5. This report is by
Brian Randell (Brian.Randell_AT_newcastle.ac.uk) and was
distributed on Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list. ==
bruces)))
The Colossus Rebuild Project
by Brian Randell
Yesterday I attended the ceremony at Bletchley Park for
the formal switching on of the recreated Colossus
computer. It was a glorious day, attended by about two
hundred people, many of whom had worked on code-breaking
at Bletchley Park during the war. The project is
essentially due to one person, Tony Sale, who is I'm sure
uniquely qualified for such a project. He was for many
years with M.I.5 (including a period as technical
assistant to Peter Wright, of "Spycatcher" fame/notoriety)
and so has a very high security clearance. He is expert
on ancient electronics, he was for several years a Senior
Curator at the Science Museum, London, (where he led the
project which got a Ferranti Pegasus and an early Elliott
computer operational again) and he has an unbelievable
ability to get things done. The document attached below is
the press briefing for yesterday's ceremony.
The recreated Colossus is remarkably authentic, though not
yet finished. (It was in fact complete enough to read
encrypted messages from the 5000 character per second
paper tape, do some basic processing using an electronic
version of the Lorenz (Tunny) rotors, and output counts
onto an electromechanical typewriter == all very
impressive. There are also a whole series of rooms in
which the various aspects of the wartime work, from radio
interception, through to processing and indexing the
results of the codebreaking, are portrayed and explained.
When I succeeded in getting the Colossus partly
declassified, and some photographs of it released, I never
dreamt that, over twenty years later, I would actually see
a real = albeit recreated = one!
Cheers
Brian
PS You will find a home page for the Colossus Rebuild
Project at:
http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/CCC/BPark/colossus
Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |