Bletchley Park

[NotAllThere]

Reading Code-breakers - the inside story of Bletchley Park.

There's a lovely section where the American contribution is recorded.

...I well remember when it was switched on... Sam threaded in a tape and, with a flourish, switched the thing on. I have never heard such a dreadful clatter from any piece of electrical equipment. .... I do not know how much current these ...relays needed, but (when) the relays pulled together, the lights dimmed in time to the clatter...

To give the machine its due, it did work, but only for a few weeks.

(when it stopped working) Sid Broadhurst... after a brief examination (of the wreckage)... turned to me with a smile and said ... "I reckon we could make one..."

So he went away and designed a Dragon using PO 3000 type relays, and in what seemed a very short time our own Dragon was assembled opposite Sam's defunct machine. The day we started it up Sam was late in getting in, and when he arrived, knowing we were starting that day, he said to me in his familiar American way, 'Well, Cappy, when are you gonna run this thing?' I replied that it was already running. I am afraid that for once Sam was speechless. Our Dragon, except for a very faint background pitter-patter, was practically silent. It ran quite happily for the rest of my time at BP..

[DimPrawn]

Was Alan Turing murdered? New book claims he didn't kill himself | Daily Mail Online

[VectraMan]

I watched The Imitation Game a couple of weeks ago. Quite good actually. Presumably it's bollocks when it comes to historical accuracy, but then any film where the Americans don't win the war single handed is a win.

[Platypus]

I watched The Imitation Game a couple of weeks ago. Quite good actually. Presumably it's bollocks when it comes to historical accuracy, but then any film where the Americans don't win the war single handed is a win.

Bits of it quite true. For example, when they broke the code, they didn't quite know what to do with the intelligence. They couldn't just scupper every German plan cos then the Germans would know that he code had been broken and change it.

[BrilloPad]

Fabulous place to visit. The kids enjoyed it too.

Shame about Alan Turing. If he had not been persecuted the UK could have led the world in computing after the war.

[MyUserName]

Bits of it quite true. For example, when they broke the code, they didn't quite know what to do with the intelligence. They couldn't just scupper every German plan cos then the Germans would know that he code had been broken and change it.

ISTR there was a guy who's main job was to work out how much of the information they could actually use and how to make it look like they had stumbled upon it by accident etc?

[NotAllThere]

ISTR there was a guy who's main job was to work out how much of the information they could actually use and how to make it look like they had stumbled upon it by accident etc?

Not one man. The German decrypts were translated by one team, then passed onto various speciality teams, depending on the content, who decided how the intelligence should be used and who should receive it. The rule was that any intelligence had to look as though it had come from anything other than code breaking E.g. if the location of a convoy of ships supplying Rommel was identified from a message, a reconnaissance plane would overfly the area, so that it looked like chance. A lot of information was just indexed to be researched by other analysts to find useful intelligence.

They also had to be careful when they sent the information out that it didn't match too closely the original messages.

[Wilmslow]

I watched The Imitation Game a couple of weeks ago. Quite good actually. Presumably it's bollocks when it comes to historical accuracy, but then any film where the Americans don't win the war single handed is a win.

The accuracy is indeed questionable. I know the house he died in - it is a large detatched house in Wilmslow, Cheshire. In the film it was the Manchester police who visited his home which was a mid-terrace house!

[VectraMan]

Not one man. The German decrypts were translated by one team, then passed onto various speciality teams, depending on the content, who decided how the intelligence should be used and who should receive it. The rule was that any intelligence had to look as though it had come from anything other than code breaking E.g. if the location of a convoy of ships supplying Rommel was identified from a message, a reconnaissance plane would overfly the area, so that it looked like chance. A lot of information was just indexed to be researched by other analysts to find useful intelligence.

They also had to be careful when they sent the information out that it didn't match too closely the original messages.

One of the BS things in the film was that it was Turing and co. that made that decision, getting all emotional for the cameras in the process. Which made no sense; the code breakers were there to break the code, not to make decisions on how the information would be used.

[CretinWatcher]

Film was crap, but the good thing is that it finally made me get the book off the shelf where it had been sitting for years, and actually read it.

"Alan Turing: the Enigma"

One of the finest scientific biographies ever.