![]() The breakthrough came as a stroke of luck in August 1941 when an operator in Athens sent the same 4000 character message twice with the same settings on his Lorenz machine, providing the reduced odds of decryption that the Bletchley staff needed to eventually decode it. The museum takes the visitor through the listening stations and how the frequency-shift-keyed teleprinter traffic was recorded on paper tape and hand-transcribed, before transporting them to the cryptoanalysts at Bletchley Park and their efforts to glean the workings of the system. The Fish That Shortened The War The museum’s Tunny machine. It had a superficial resemblance to Enigma in that it employed a rotor system, but instead of Enigma’s system of through-wired contacts its rotors produced a pseudo-random binary sequence that was XORed with the binary teleprinter traffic to produce an encrypted output. Also unlike Enigma the codebreakers did not have the benefit of a captured machine to study until very near the end of the war, so their only means to understand it came from intercepted messages using it. The first section of the museum’s Tunny gallery explains the Lorenz cipher, which was used for secure communication at a much higher level between German high command outposts, encoding teleprinter traffic in real time. This was the code of German military combat units in slightly different forms by all services, and photographs show them being operated from forward positions or in mobile signals units.Įnigma was not however the only German encoding system in use and intercepted by the Allies, and by no means the only one on which the staff at Bletchley Park were employed. The most famous Nazi encoding system is the Enigma, with its portable machines resembling typewriters becoming a ubiquitous symbol of the codebreaking efforts. The first is their Tunny gallery, which explains the context and sequence of events which led to Colossus, and the second is their Colossus gallery, which contains their fully functional replica of a MkII Colossus computer. The museum has a fascinating collection, of which two galleries are of interest to us here. Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-769-0229-11A / Borchert, Erich (Eric) / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsĪt this point we’re going to take you to Bletchley, to the modern-day Bletchley Park site and the National Museum Of Computing which occupies one corner of it. ![]() ![]() To Bletchley, Where Miracles Happen General Heinz Guderian overlooking the operation of an Enigma machine during the Battle of France. It wasn’t invented at Bletchley, its job was not the Enigma work, and most surprisingly Alan Turing’s direct involvement was only peripheral. Colossus is the computer you are looking for, it was developed in World War Two and kept secret for many years afterwards, but the rest of the Received Opinion answer is false. Unfortunately it contains such significant untruths as to be rendered useless. ![]() It’s such a temptingly perfect soundbite laden with pluck and derring-do that could so easily be taken from a 1950s Eagle comic, isn’t it. The Received Opinion answer is therefore “The first programmable electronic digital computer was Colossus, invented at Bletchley Park in World War Two by Alan Turing to break the Nazi Enigma codes, and it was kept secret until the 1970s”. If we restrict the question to “Who invented the first programmable electronic digital computer?” we have a much simpler answer, because we have ample evidence of the machine in question. So if we are to search for an inventor in this field we have to be a little more specific than “Who invented the first computer?”, because there are so many candidates. Blaise Pascal’s 17th century French mechanical calculator, Charles Babbage and Ada, Countess Lovelace’s work in 19th century Britain, Herman Hollerith’s American tabulators at the end of that century, or Konrad Zuse’s work in prewar Germany represent just a few of them. The history of computing is no exception, with many steps along the path that has given us the devices we rely on for so much today. The truth is in so many cases an invention does not have a single Eureka moment, instead the named inventor builds on the work of so many others who have gone before and is the lucky engineer or scientist whose ideas result in the magic breakthrough before anyone else’s. The inventor’s name will sometimes differ depending on which country you are in when you hear the story, which provides an insight into the flaws in the simple invention tales. That apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, or Archimedes overflowing his bath, you’ve heard the stories. Before the event there was no invention, then as if by magic it was there. When the story of an invention is repeated as Received Opinion for the younger generation it is so often presented as a single one-off event, with a named inventor.
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