Staff and students all arrived at college early on Tuesday morning in order to travel to The National Museum of Computing. This activity was educational and highly enjoyable.
TNMOC is located on the famous Bletchley Park estate in Buckinghamshire, which meant a long journey there and back. The various galleries of the museum are housed inside the original buildings used by the WW2 code-breakers.
Our students did us proud in the way they engaged with the talks provided by the extremely knowledgeable guides. They listened with attention and asked relevant questions. The story of the people working at Bletchley Park was kept secret for many years. Their achievements changed the course of WW2, saved countless lives, and helped liberate occupied countries.
The artefacts and machines in the museum have been carefully restored and maintained, and it was amazing to see them in working order. These included an original German Enigma Machine and the Turing-Welchman Bombe which was able to decode new messages by working out the code settings. The Enigma encryption was regarded as unbreakable since it could have 159 million, million, million settings!
It was great to hear aspects of the human side of the story: the working conditions and the pressure people were under. At midnight, the Nazis would always change the settings on their encoding machines. After radio stations started picking up the first messages, the teams working together at Bletchley were able to find the settings of the day by about 8:00 a.m.
This was thanks to workers encoding the garbled message on streams of punched tape and cryptologists and mathematicians performing statistical analysis with the aid of the Bombe to speed things up. The Nazi high command had even more sophisticated encoding and messaging methods based on the Lorenz Machine. The codebreakers succeeded in breaking this after building the “Colossus,” the world’s first large-scale electronic digital computer. The machine operated at 300 volts DC, and workers needed to wear Wellington boots as they stood in flood water and operated Colossus!
Our students also enjoyed looking at displays of first-generation computers, mainframes, and a comprehensive display of PCs, office and home computers, as well as game consoles.
Through the trip to TNMOC we learned about the history of computers and the impact they have had. It also gave us an insight into the future and how computer technology will continue to play new roles in our lives.
Greg Cook