The National Museum of Computing

One train ride and a short walk was all it took to arrive at a place which houses and cares for machines that helped to bring the power of information into the global arena. Our guide at The National Museum of Computing, Sheridan Williams, led us through the eras of computing and the machines with which companies were able to exponentially streamline their industries. Before this though, Mr. Williams took us to the rooms containing the coding machines of World War II.

One example was The Lorenz SZ42, which used a complex combination of 12 rotors to encrypt a message. Every individual message was encrypted in a different way by changing the start position of each rotor before transmitting the message. Mr. Williams asked us how many combinations of unique sets of start positions there could be, but none of us being mathematicians (far from it) we couldn't guess. The answer is 1.6 million, billion. And no, the "billion" following that "million" is not a typo.

So how was the code broken and the encrypted message read? A man by the name of Bill Tutte was able to understand how the Lorenz SZ42 worked without ever having seen one.

Lorenz SZ42 on the left

Throughout the museum there was mention of the considerable contribution of work by women. One placard read that, "women made up the majority of Bletchley Park's workforce". They were nicknamed Wrens because most were enlisted in the Women's Royal Naval Service, WRNS. These women were involved in the wiring and soldering of the machines and also worked around the clock in three eight hour shifts operating the computers used for code-breaking such as the Colossus and Bombe machines (pictured below).

The first Wrens arrived at Bletchley Park (BP) in 1941 and by May of 1945 there were 2,617 Wrens at BP and its Outstations.

Our guide Sheridan Williams and the rebuild of the Bombe

Rebuild of Colossus

Though we did not visit it during our time at the museum, there is an archive on-site. To learn more about the work being done there, please visit the archive page of their website.

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