[HN Gopher] Visit Bletchley Park
___________________________________________________________________
Visit Bletchley Park
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 150 points
Date : 2024-08-29 23:46 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bletchleypark.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bletchleypark.org.uk)
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| If you're interested in historical buildings, go ahead, visit
| Bletchley Park. But expect most of the exhibits to be buildings,
| living quarters, offices etc. and mundane descriptions of day-to-
| day life there, not exhibits about the technical/cryptological
| aspects (although they do have some of those too).
|
| If you're interested in computer history and Bombe/Colossus,
| visit the much lesser known National Museum of Computing at the
| same site. https://www.tnmoc.org/
|
| I spent way too much time at the the boring parts of Bletchley
| Park and as a result didn't have enough time for the Museum of
| Computing.
|
| I'd recommend starting at the Museum of Computing, then if you
| have time left, the 1-2 buildings inside the official Bletchley
| Park museum that have the crypto exhibits.
| rst wrote:
| Note also that the two museums have different schedules, so
| you'll want to make sure you go when both are open.
| jwmcq wrote:
| This caught me out when I was a teenager. Luckily, there was
| a chap in the Museum of Computing who was spending his Sunday
| working on the Colossus, and he was happy to let me in and
| show me around! I'll never forget that kindness, it was truly
| a fascinating trip.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| The people that work at the Museum of Computing are truly
| amazing! I had such a blast there!
| trebligdivad wrote:
| I found chatting to the people working on stuff was the
| best bit. Almost the level of ignoring the exhibits and
| look at the bits of stuff being worked on around.
| jtms wrote:
| I was there a few years ago and will echo the fact that the
| folks I interacted with at the museum of computing were
| truly world class fantastic. When someone loves what they
| do and where they are it really shows.
| tialaramex wrote:
| My boss at Experian took our team to Bletchley Park
| intending to go to the NMOC but not having checked that was
| actually open. Hilarious.
|
| Fortunately the small Memorial to the Polish Cryptographers
| who are the reason this was worth attempting is outside so
| we could visit that, about a third of the team were Polish
| (we hired away some subcontractors from a Polish firm, and
| then we were in turn bought by Experian) so visiting this
| memorial was a key part of our intent.
|
| Also IIRC at that time the Bombe was still not in TNMOC,
| and Colossus was in a separate building so you could see
| it, but the rest of TNMOC was closed.
|
| I've also seen an even earlier incarnation of TNMOC when I
| was younger, just basically a room heaped with obsolete
| computer gear, with some nerds who know roughly what it is
| but aren't equipped to properly exhibit or explain it. I
| remember they'd set up some video game consoles, something
| like the original Sonic The Hedgehog maybe, because they
| wanted children to have some positive impression, obviously
| a kitchen appliance sized "disk drive" doesn't mean
| anything to a child, but it's obvious Sonic is a game even
| if you're used to much flashier graphics.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I visited both, on a whim, while I was by accident in the area,
| prodded by a comment just like this. It was a fantastic
| experice! And I did enjoy the National Museum of Computing
| more! There was an excellent elderly guide there that seemed to
| have been in computing since forever and told us stories of
| when he worked on machines just like the ones in the
| exhibition. A small bunch of us nerdy guys hung around him and
| it was great interacting with them and the tour guide. It was
| really really an excelent experice!
|
| If I'm ever in the area again, I would love to revisit and I
| would love to have my young son with me as well.
| trsohmers wrote:
| +1 this commenter. I just visited the UK for the first time at
| the beginning of this month and had a fantastic ~3 hours at
| Bletchley Park, but felt I had to cram TNMOC and the amazing
| Colossus live demonstration (where I asked a million questions)
| and everything else in the museum in the 90 minutes I was
| there. If I assume other HN readers are like me, I would
| dedicate at least 2.5-3 hours for TNMOC to actually get a
| chance to actually see and play around with their extensive
| collection of vintage machines.
| Animats wrote:
| Indeed. The two groups don't get along. The building
| restoration people get most of the money. The computing people
| are apparently a tenant.
|
| I visited in 2002, before the building people were getting
| money from the National Trust. Way too much tour guide info
| about the architecture of the mansion, which is not of any real
| architectural significance. If you like English manor houses
| with the usual pond and swans, there are better ones to visit.
| zulban wrote:
| I recently visited London and TNMOC was the highlight of my
| trip.
| happymellon wrote:
| But they are nowhere near London.
| physicsguy wrote:
| A 100 miles is a long distance in the UK, a 100 years in
| the US is a long time.
| happymellon wrote:
| I went to Washington DC, the best part of that was
| Philadelphia.
| dmazin wrote:
| This is a nonsense comment. Easy to get to by train from
| London. Don't be discouraged by this comment.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think the point (see GP's other comment 'Philadelphia
| was the highlight of my trip to Washington D.C.') is that
| it's not part of a trip to London, your trip is to the
| UK, or England, you stayed in London, and visited
| elsewhere too.
|
| A lot of foreigners seem to conflate London with the
| entire country in a way that doesn't seem to happen for
| other countries (you don't 'go to Paris' and actually
| stay in Marseilles) and some people outside London
| especially understandably don't like it.
|
| _Not_ that it 's an unreachable distance away for a trip
| based in London.
| atq2119 wrote:
| It is clearly outside of London, but an easy enough day
| trip by train.
|
| Since you brought up Paris, I'd compare it to Versailles.
| OJFord wrote:
| As I said yes.
| happymellon wrote:
| Not really considering Versailles is in the suburbs of
| Paris, whilst Bletchly is not a suburb of London but next
| to Milton Keynes.
| well_actulily wrote:
| Sure, but if Versailles is 30-45 minutes outside of
| central Paris by train, and Bletchley Park is about an
| hour or so outside of London, I'd venture that the extra
| ~hour round trip of travel time isn't that meaningful to
| most tourists.
| happymellon wrote:
| I didn't say that you couldn't.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 45 minutes by train from London Euston. About the same time
| as my commute and I live in Zone 3. Might not be
| geographically that near but it's very accessible.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I walked from the train station to the Museum of Computing,
| which provided enough of a walk through the Bletchley facility
| (and noticing enough "Asbestos Warning" signs) to fill my need
| for that portion of the site.
|
| If nothing else, being able to say "Milton Keynes is on my
| tourist bucket list" is an amusing thing to say to UK co-
| workers.
| OJFord wrote:
| > If nothing else, being able to say "Milton Keynes is on my
| tourist bucket list" is an amusing thing to say to UK co-
| workers.
|
| I'd probably guess you were fascinated by the idea of
| roundabouts.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I think it's testing how fast you can go from ~25 (depends
| on how quickly you dare take a roundabout) to 70 in between
| each roundabout that is the best part of living next to MK.
| lfn3 wrote:
| I can second this. The Museum of Computing was much more
| interesting to me than Bletchley Park. The working replicas of
| electro-mechanical computers were terrific, and the
| guides/operators there had a wealth of interesting knowledge
| and anecdotes. I learned much more about the use of these
| machines for code breaking there than I did at Bletchley Park.
| rdl wrote:
| I went a few months ago -- was amazing how much better the
| Museum of Computing was, given it obviously had a tiny budget
| compared to Bletchley. Bletchley was mostly a bunch of school
| groups being bored and filling the space, empty buildings, etc.
|
| Museum of Computing was extra amazing because some of the
| volunteers had worked on the hardware on display (and I'd
| worked on stuff 20 years after that), so we were able to talk
| about the actual hardware/OSes.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Umm I've been to Bletchley and NMOC twice and although the
| latter does have the particularly interesting live demos of the
| restored/recreated Colossus etc, it's completely wrong to say
| the "main" museum complex doesn't have much about the
| technical/crypto aspects.
|
| If anything I'd say it's the other way around - there are
| exhibits on the way of life etc but the majority of them are on
| the cryptology and the approach the people working there took
| etc. I'm wondering if you accidentally missed one or two of the
| buildings.
| zitsarethecure wrote:
| I'm strongly in agreement with you. I thought the main museum
| was fascinating. You could only find it "boring" if you have
| no curiosity about the history of world war two or you just
| don't care about the human impact of the war on the
| communities and the people it affected.
| petecog wrote:
| +1. TNMOC is a gem. If you visit, and you can, buy something in
| their shop.
|
| If you find yourself nr Cambridge. Then I highly recommend.
| https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
| rwmj wrote:
| The Cambridge museum you mention was surprisingly good. They
| have all sorts of weird things (remember that time that Lyons
| Tea manufactured their own line of mainframe computers? -
| they have one!). Also an original wirewrapped Spectrum
| prototype.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| If you can go for a live demo of Bletchley Park's fully
| recreated Bombe, that's pretty special.
|
| Edit: Oh wow, apparently the Bombe was moved to the National
| Museum of Computing some years ago. TNMOC wins!
| OJFord wrote:
| Ah that explains a lot. I was confused reading some of the
| comments here, because to my memory all the war
| computing/enigma & post-war work was in BP museum, and TNMOC
| had a brief mentioned to link but was mostly later personal
| computing / early displays for ATC, etc.
|
| TNMOC _wasn 't_ better to me, because I was more interested
| in Turing et al. than 80s vintage computing. (And some people
| would be the opposite, I was just surprised to see so many
| comments saying it's almost objectively better for this
| crowd.) But if all the computing side is there now makes
| sense that people are saying that.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The current re-arrangement, in which the Bombe is housed by
| TNMOC to me probably makes things murkier than would be
| desirable although I'm sure it helps TNMOC attract visitors
| because people do like a Bombe demo (the Bombe is a replica,
| the real Bombes were destroyed because they were secret).
|
| The Bombe isn't a computer any more than a basic electric
| toaster is a computer, and Enigma is nothing like how you'd do
| encryption today. It's cool to look at, but IMO it doesn't
| belong in a Computing museum.
|
| In contrast (and remember this is later in the same war)
| Colossus is a digital computer (albeit not a _stored program_
| digital computer) and it attacks Lorenz, which is a stream
| cipher (albeit 8-bit bytes haven 't been invented back then).
| Of course Colossus doesn't _look_ like anything much, it 's a
| computer, most of the stuff that's happening is invisible, and
| you can't understand why it breaks Lorenz, the math is very
| difficult.
|
| However Colossus and Lorenz, unlike the Bombe and Enigma, are
| clear ancestors of the technologies we rely on every day,
| Salsa20 is a popular modern stream cipher, you are undoubtedly
| reading this on a digital computer. They're as connected to us
| as the vast physical disks in another TNMOC room, or the BBC
| Microcomputer (British older people may remember these from
| school) or the exhibit about FIDO Bulletin Board Systems.
| netaustin wrote:
| We spent a whole gray day at Bletchley and TNMOC and I
| appreciated the connection between Bletchley and TNMOC given
| the context of WWII. To me Bletchley is more about process, a
| metaphorical "Scrum room" of one of the most important math
| and science programs in history. And taken together, they
| encapsulate sort of a catalyzing moment that computing
| prehistory transitioned to computing history.
|
| My history-teacher wife liked Bletchley a lot more than
| TNMOC, where I lingered too long, but I did like both. Even
| though the Bombe replica was down for repairs that day.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Definitely if your interest is World War II, or the
| Intelligence process, the human side, any of that - the
| Bletchley Park exhibits are key and TNMOC is at most a side
| visit, whereas if your interest is computing, TNMOC is key
| and there's no reason to do more than pencil in the rest of
| the Bletchley Park site as a possible extra.
|
| I don't know about Science. There's a lot of math and logic
| puzzle solving at Bletchley, but the other crash projects
| of WWII have a lot more science, Los Alamos obviously,
| translating from "In principle nuclear fission is a more
| powerful bomb than anything previously made" to an actual
| weapon you can use to destroy a Japanese city. But also the
| invention of the Cavity Magnetron - a little box can make
| enough radio waves to make a radar for your night fighter
| so you can figure out where the enemy planes are relative
| to you - or it can use those waves to heat a delicious
| baked potato in a few minutes...
| currymj wrote:
| it does seem like working on the Bombe got Alan Turing
| really deep into thinking about hardware. he'd previously
| played around with building some logic circuits but seems
| like he didn't go deep into it before Bletchley, before
| that he was mostly a very pure mathematician.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Turing was interested in lots of things. As a coincidence
| one of the small jobs I did many years ago was to develop
| the Turing Archive's web site, which I'm glad to see has
| since been substantially renovated:
| https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/ - For that work we
| had a lot of high resolution images of non-Computing
| stuff Turing cared about, including Morphogensis
| (basically, why things are the shapes they are, for
| example why is a rose petal shaped that way? Why stripes
| on giraffes but spots on dalmations?).
|
| So _mathematics_ yes, Turing was always interested in
| that, but always applicability was on Turing 's mind. In
| the early twentieth century Turing's "machine" in a paper
| he wrote at Princeton (before the war) was just an idea,
| but er, obviously with the exception of the need for an
| "infinite" paper tape you can _realise_ Turing 's
| machine, it's a computer, familiar to everybody today.
|
| Even after Bletchley Turing wasn't a Software Engineer.
| The meta-applicability isn't something which would occur
| to a mathematician. That took Grace Hopper. Grace
| understood that the problem her people were tasked with
| (mechanically convert instructions to the code for the
| actual machine) is exactly the same sort of task the
| machine is doing anyway, and she invents the _Compiler_.
| precommunicator wrote:
| Wait, there was something other than Museum of Computing in
| Bletchley Park?! I honestly didn't noticed, I went straight to
| that museum and I don't think there were other notices that
| there is something else there.
| tmdetect wrote:
| You would think they would make the differentiation quite
| obvious. Thanks for the TNMOC tip.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I hate to agree with you because Bletchley Park is a historic
| site, but sadly your comment resonates with my takeaway from
| when I visited too.
| Zhyl wrote:
| Bletchley Park is excellent - I went in the early 2000s when it
| was just some huts and a country house. I return in 2024 and they
| now have full exhibitions, including one that goes through the
| full history and workings of the Bombe. I thought I was a bit of
| an Enigma nerd but it turns out I hadn't heard of Lorenz/Tunny at
| all and so it really added another layer to my knowledge of the
| work at Bletchley.
|
| Also visiting Bletchley and then watching the Imitation Game
| makes it seem like the rushed medical drama from Mitchell and
| Webb [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_AmdvxbPT8
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| Turing's life and work was a big part of my research and I was
| involved with a number of academic Turing memorial events, I've
| had dinner with his closest living relative. I'm well aware of
| all the inaccuracies.
|
| I was given 114 minutes I don't think I could have done a
| better job of giving a feel for the guy, his work, and the
| situation to an intelligent person who has a passing interest
| in tech (e.g. my wife) than they did in the film.
|
| This may just say more about me as a story-teller than as a
| genuine appraisal of the film.
|
| If you want detail, read Turing's biography by Andrew Wiles,
| such a great work and impressively comprehensive. If you just
| like code breaking and WWII history, read The Hut Six story by
| "Turing's boss" Gordon Welchman, the publication of which lost
| him his American and British security clearances.
| Zhyl wrote:
| >I was given 114 minutes I don't think I could have done a
| better job of giving a feel for the guy, his work, and the
| situation to an intelligent person who has a passing interest
| in tech (e.g. my wife) than they did in the film.
|
| I feel like I'm fairly forgiving when it comes to glossing
| over some details in order to serve the greater narrative,
| but I feel all of the film's points of conflict were
| fabricated to the point of being misleading.
|
| Turing was a genius, but he wasn't a sole genius loner - he
| was a much liked and integral member of the team. Much of the
| plot is about him supposedly single handedly and against the
| will of Bletchley working on the Bombe when the Polish Bombe
| was a tried and true solution to Enigma-sans-plugboard
| already. This image of him being some kind of rebel is
| absolutely not giving you a "feel" for his situation.
|
| The idea that the machine wasn't working and they had no idea
| how it was going to work until they "suddenly had the idea of
| using a crib" is trying to add a peril and a Eureka moment
| that didn't exist. From a "let's not get waded down in the
| details" point of view, sure but again this really adds more
| of a sole genius factor on Turing specifically when he was
| but one genius in a factory of geniuses.
|
| Things like having one bombe in the corner of a room quietly
| breaking all the Nazi's codes? Sure, why not. It's very silly
| and downplays the roles of hundreds of Wrens, but you can
| have that for the sake of storytelling.
|
| We may have different things that we wanted from this film,
| but honestly rewatching it it just felt like it was muddying
| the waters of what I already knew rather than being a fun
| accessible glimpse into the life of one of History's greatest
| minds.
| sblank wrote:
| If you're interested in the history of how the Poles and then
| British not only cracked the German Enigma Cipher machine used in
| world war 2, but then operationalized the interception,
| decryption and dissemination process - this is the place. There's
| quite a bit written about how the Enigma cipher system worked,
| but it isn't until you get to Bletchley Park do you understand
| the size, scope and scale of how they turned decryption of
| intercepted messages into an industrial process that gave the
| Allies a strategic edge in WW2. A must visit next time you're in
| London (35 minute train from Euston station, 5 minute walk to the
| museum.)
| LennyHenrysNuts wrote:
| I used to visit regularly when I lived in the UK. It's right on
| the train line, go and see an important part of modern history.
| glompers wrote:
| And will, before long, be on the rebuilt Varsity Line between
| Oxford and Cambridge.
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd bet much on that "before" long part. At
| least not as far as Cambridge, the other end seems more
| certain.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > It's right on the train line
|
| If memory serves, this, and the proximity to London, Oxford and
| Cambridge, are why it was chosen as the site for the code
| breaking programme.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| And the tickets are valid for 12 months. So you can visit one day
| and if you run out of time or want to go back and dive into more
| detail on something you can use the same tickets to come back
| with in in a year and go round again.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Many of the people HN appeals to will find Bletchley Park
| fascinating, but I can report that my wife, who has no specific
| interest in any of the topics that makes the place historic, was
| also fascinated when we visited some time ago, and regularly
| recommends it as a place to visit.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a great novel that partially takes place
| in Bletchley Park, I can highly recommend Cryptonomicon by Neil
| Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame).
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Usual caveats about Neal Stephenson apply but I think
| Cryptonomicon presents a much more compelling portrait of Alan
| Turing than the film The Imitation game which incorrectly
| portrays him as a repressed nerd single handedly solving all
| the problems.
| beng-nl wrote:
| Pardon me, I loved the cryptonomicon but I don't know what
| the usual caveats are about the author, could you share with
| the class please :-) ?
| tialaramex wrote:
| I don't know if this was what your parent meant, but
|
| One of the fairly noticeable problems with Stephenson is
| that he uses the "rape as character development" trope a
| lot for female characters. So, that's not great. In general
| in fact female characters in his novels are not written as
| if they were - you know - people, and even when they're the
| protagonist we get some weird male gaze stuff going on.
|
| It's not a deal breaker, Diamond Age is one of my favourite
| novels despite this. But certainly it feels at best lazy.
|
| Other routine complaints are that Stephenson's novels are
| too long (fair) under edited (presumably with the same root
| cause, ie celebrity) and poorly paced (e.g. six chapters
| about the protagonist preparing and then eating cereals,
| two pages on the climactic bank heist they've spent the
| whole book planning)
|
| Technically I think Stephenson suffers from having noticed
| that, unlike many contemporaries who wrote fiction set in
| the near future, he actually has some idea what he was
| writing about and not realising how limited that knowledge
| is. William Gibson knows he has no idea how a computer
| works, so in a Gibson novel he's not trying to convince you
| his protagonist knows which IPv6 routing protocol to use -
| William Gibson doesn't know what IPv6 is. But Neal might
| spend a paragraph about some nonsense that seems plausible
| if you know as much as he does... but then is laughable if
| you know more. That seems if anything worse than what
| Gibson chose.
|
| I like hard SF, but hard SF is really difficult. One of my
| other favourite novels is Greg Egan's "Incandescence". Egan
| isn't great at writing women either, but in Incandescence
| he cuts himself a break, nobody involved is technically
| human anyway, but he did spend a _lot_ of time figuring out
| all the tricky physics needed to make the novel 's story
| work. Is there really a civilisation in the core of our
| galaxy? We'll probably never know, but Egan attempted to
| design a scenario that could, in principle, technically
| work.
| joe200 wrote:
| You can also visit The Enigma Cipher Centre in Poznan/Poland [0]
|
| It is an exhibition about cracking Enigma by the polish
| mathematicians: M. Rejewski, H. Zygalski and J. Rozycki who then,
| at the begin of the Second World War, handed it over to the
| Allies.
|
| [0] https://csenigma.pl/en/
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Damn. I've been to Poznan many times and never even heard of
| this place before. I'll check this one out soon.
| highhedgehog wrote:
| Flights are cheap for me to Poznan. Is it worth visiting
| other then this museum?
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| The old town is charming, the food is great and lots green
| space to wander around. Citadel park is worth visiting and
| you'll not regret it.
|
| Wroclaw is 2 hours away and it's a wonderful city as well.
| Extra fun if you like treasure hunt as the city is full of
| tiny gnomes for that. Extra fun with kids.
|
| Go for it!
| imdsm wrote:
| Fantastic place, and your tickets will last for a year. There's
| also the computer museum close by (separate ticket). Really great
| place to walk around, and I think, historically important to all
| of us here. The original home of the hackers.
| Buchstabensalat wrote:
| Somewhat off-topic, but I find this webdesign hard to use,
| especially on Desktop. It looks like a good design for a print-
| out poster, but not so much for a digital site. Something is
| just... off. Perhaps the work of a designer who usually works for
| print media?
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| On a related note, if you're around Washington, DC in the US,
| then the National Cryptologic Museum[1] is well worth a visit.
| They have a ton of equipment on exhibit, including a variety of
| mechanical encryption machines as well as early supercomputers.
|
| It doesn't get that many visitors, because it's within Fort Meade
| (home of the NSA), and most people probably don't even realize
| it's open to the public.
|
| [1] https://www.nsa.gov/museum/
| memling wrote:
| I second this: don't go down the wrong entrance, but definitely
| do visit. It's a fun time with knowledgeable employees that
| will take you on a tour. You can also see some of the machinery
| used to crack Japanese codes and some historical attempts at
| codes and code-breaking. It's a fascinating place.
| jherskovic wrote:
| I was there a few weeks ago! I had always wanted to visit, so it
| was a bucket list item for me and I absolutely loved it. The
| conditions in which people worked tirelessly while trying to eke
| out a bit of a normal life in between were so interesting.
|
| I am kicking myself that I couldn't stop at the Museum of
| Computing, but the family was jetlagged and really tired.
| Regardless of that, I considered Bletchley Park time well spent
| and an awesome visit.
| ape4 wrote:
| I can't be the only one who did a "View Source" of that site
| looking for Easter eggs
| highhedgehog wrote:
| i went there while in a summer school in Reading. Loved it and
| highly recommended! One of the things I remember was an exibith
| on how pidgeons were used in WWII
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