People have always spoken about how wars were won. The main
credits are always given to the guys on
the fields, but all wars weren't won on the war fields, were they? They
were fought in the backyards and such is the story of Bletchley park.
Bletchley Park is an amazing story of unsung war heroes who
played games from the inside. Alan Turing and his men assisted in hijacking!
No, they weren't terrorists! They hijacked messages passing in the German camp.
These guys didn't specifically announce what they were going to do until they
started their work. They got a good set of cumbersome computers working and
encrypting information about the war. The reason why I called those computers
cumbersome was because they weren't android phones :p. They were huge on
es and definitely tough to crack.
Many would say Bletchley Park is merely a historic monument,
but the place bared witness to many amazing advances in the computer continuum.
The place used to be a Mecca for some engineers because of the Legends who
worked there and type of computers invented on its holy land. It is located in
Bletchley which is currently in Buckinghamshire.
Many of the university scholars like Dr. Alan Turing were
told to report to Bletchley Park immediately in 1939 in anticipation of war.
The workforce was limited, so many of these scholars had to return their universities and recruit their best
students, hence eventually inventing a
secret society which would help out in intercepting the German message sending
and receiving systems. With a lot of persuasion and message decryption being
the need of the hour, Winston Churchill agreed on providing the engineers at the
Park with resources they needed.
Many of these engineers solved problems and labyrinths which
would have haunted computer societies for years. Bletchley Park could be
considered an old version of CERN where people from different backgrounds came
together and helped build new technology or look at it from a different
perspective.
The Germans used to send messages to their troops regarding
war strategies and lots of other stuff. These messages could easily be
intercepted. The wired channels were compromised by cutting the wire and
tricking the system by setting up an artificial receiver. The wireless
communication channel, on the other hand was stalled by just installing a
wireless receiver and finding out the right frequency for the same. Eventually
and gradually the Germans got smarter with all the information being leaked.
The Germans hired an encrypting machine called Enigma which would encrypt the
message into different syllables and would leave the interceptor entirely
clueless as to what the message is!
There were some
polish engineers who discovered a way to crack the enigma encryption by using a
machine called BOMBA, which also meant polish ice cream dessert. Alan Turing
covered the shortcomings of the BOMBA and made his own computer which was
called the BOMBE. Alan Turing assumed that the German would use text. He would
predict the presence of the text at a certain point. This was called a
plaintext attack. The bombe weighed about one ton, was housed in a bronze-colored
metal cabinet about 7 feet wide, 6 feet 6 inches tall and 2 feet deep and was
mounted on castors. Protruding from the front of the cabinet there were 108
shafts (more in some models, fewer in the two prototypes) arranged in three 12
x 3 arrays on which drums were mounted. The Bombe would simulate 36 Enigma
machines which was quite resourceful.
In event of this the Germans
stopped using the Enigma system and started a new system which were called secret writers which
used tele-printer traffic for encrypting
and making it much more difficult to decrypt. In reply to this, the Bletchley
park scientist put together a prototype called Colossus. This machine contained
1600 thermionic valves (tubes) and was soon followed by an improved production
Mark 2 machine. Nine of this version of the machine were constructed, the first
being commissioned on 1 June 1944, after which Allen Coombs took over leadership of Colossus production.
The original Mark 1 machine was converted into a Mark 2 and an eleventh
Colossus was essentially finished when the war in Europe ended. The main units
of Colossus' design were as follows:-
A tape transport and photo-electric
reading mechanism , coder and adder that simulated the Lorenz machine using
thyratron rings, logic unit that performed Boolean operations. A master control that contained
the electronic counters, printer.
The machine decrypted messages in 6 hours which would take
6 weeks to decrypt by hand. This increased the usefulness of the machine.
Bletchley Park is s place of historic importance
in terms of computing. It harbored many free minded scientists and vented the
mindset for others. It’s now turned into
a museum and yes it’s glistening but not with ghost, with heroes who gave it
their best and in turn produced the greatest computers of all time. 
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