THE BRITISH THREAD

no never been to bletchley park

went once (by appointment) to some obscure govt research establishment in buckinghamshire (i think) it took ages to find..it was not on the map..when I got there they wouldnt let me in...clearly reputation preceeded me.

quite proud of that.

Believe you can buy a ticket for Bletchley park?

Oh yes!

They've done a wonderful job in restoring it all. Really good day out.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Actually, the French purchased a commercial version of the enigma machine in the late 1920s, and in the 1930s, Polish intelligence agents staged an automobile accident in the "Polish corridor" leading to Danzig when they had information that a military version of the enigma machine was being transported there. The most appalling part of that little venture was that the Germans apparently failed to officially notice that their little machine was missing, and to wonder why so many bleak looking Polish police officers had arrived on the scene of the accident within minutes of its occurance.

The brilliance of the enigma work arose from the mathematical genius applied at Bletchey Park (sp?--is that the wozit where the thingamabob was done?) to break the new code sequences the Germans routinely came up with--having the enigma machine on hand, though, meant that it was that much easier. The boys at Bletchley Park (?) were brilliant, no doubt about it.

During the Dieppe fiasco, while Candians in their hundreds were being killed to prove their loyalty to Georgie Six, a team of Commandos slipped in past the Hun, and with them they had a single Royal Air Force aircrewman who was an electronics genius. They made straight for a German radar facility near the coast, and captured it with the control panel intact. He dismantled the control panel, made notes, and then the Commandos blew the whole shebang up, leaving no trace that the "secrets" of German radar had been investigated. They then hightailed it back to the beach and got away with what i am sure was one highly relieved aircrewman. While they were there, that boy spotted a device which he was certain was not your graden variety typewriter, and he scooped it up before they left. It was a 1942 military version of the enigma encoding machine. That was a very handy acquisition.

One thing the Hun has always been miserable at is military intelligence and counterintelligence. That's why a French agent was able to just walk in the door and by the 1928 model of the enigma, which was originally simply an encoding device to prevent industrial espionage. That was also why the Poles were able to whisk away a 1936 military model of the enigma machine with Abwehr none the wiser. Admiral Canaris, who ran Abwehr, was one of the best friends the Allies ever had.

One thing the Sassanach are bloody good at is intelligence, we have evidence of this dating back to Elizabethan times, and the great Duke of Marlborough once successfully defended himself in the House of Lords on a charge of peculation by showing that he had spent the funds in question on the secret service. It was embarrassing (from a German point of view) how easily their intelligence efforts were dealt with in the Second World War. At the end of 1939, the English swept up all but two of the German agents then in England, and those two got out of Dodge pretty damned quick. Most of those agents were "turned," and sent in radio reports to Berlin which had been scripted by the intelligence services of the Imperial Staff. Winston talks about it in his book about the Second World War--including the fact that they consistently fed false information on the bomb landing sites from V-weapons so that the Germans would think they were overshooting London, and drop the range, causing the V-weapons to land in East Anglia. Winston freely admits that he was trading a few lives in the countryside for hundreds of lives in London.

Nasty business war is, but if you have to fight one, i'd advise hiring MI5 and MI6--they know their business thoroughly.

(EDIT: Yes, Bletchley Park--so my memory has abandoned me entirely.)

indeed

and I can now reveal, to the world and Vladimir Putin, that Angela Merkel wears pink knickers.

You know old Vladdy was stationed in East Germany in the bad old days . . . he might already know that Angela wears pink knickers . . .

Wow! That's the first time I've read one of your brilliant pieces, Set.....AND KNEW IT ALL!

No, I'm not suddenly becoming super intelligent, it just happens to be a subject in which I'm really interested.

Did you know that there are still one or two codes from the later Nazi machine that remain unbroken?

Anyways.....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5320978.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4808882.stm

Bletchley Park is better known as "Station X", and is about 50 miles due North of London. If you're ever over this way, I'll take you up there.

Ellpus wrote



You really should do your research!

I drive down Alan Turing Way, past Eastlands, to Asda...

x

Cool beans, Boss, i'll hold you to that, if i'm ever in Merry Old.

If i recall from the thread about the fuel depot which exploded, you're in the countryside north of London, aren't you? You could drive to Bletchley Park in under an hour, n'est-ce pas?

http://www.myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=Turing

"Born in London into a scientifically undistinguished family........"

Oui Monsieur, it's straight up the M1 motorway from me, about 40 mins?

Good post set.

British intelligence did out perform German in WW2. Not that we were more 'intelligent' but because imo we were a) desperate b) somwhat less hidebound by hubris c) lucky.

We did indeed feed back all sorts of disinformation to German high command. Probably the most important was the D Day landing areas, which Hitler believed to be the Pas de Calais until it was almost too late.

Regarding the vengeance weapons, we deliberately reported them landing too far north. result was Croydon was devastated. The first V2 landed in a field not too far from here, now a nature reserve. The von Braun nut hatch is a welcome visitor.

Wow, LE, thanks for those links. Now i wonder if those messages came from the machine which was picked up in the Dieppe raid, or if the Germans came up with a new version because they knew one of their machines had been lifted. Do you have any light to shed on that?

One of my favorite English secret service stories is that of Aphra Benn.



Aphra Benn was a minor Restoration playwright who also happened to be an agent of the English secret service. She had at one time been married to a Dutch merchant, and therefore could travel to Holland without attracting any notice, even though England and Holland fought three naval wars.

Miss Benn warned her spy master that the Dutch planned to attack the Royal Navy anchorage at Chatham, on the River Medway. They decided that the report was unreliable (and the only conclusion possible from the scant documents available is that they distrusted military information gathered by a woman--the twits), and took no steps, and didn't even notify James, Duke of York, who then commanded the Royal Navy. The Battle of the Medway, as it is often referred to, was a major embarrassment for the English. Samuel Pepys, who then worked for the Admiralty, went up to Chatham after the Dutch had left, and reported that the people there told him that the Dutch had been very polite, and had paid for everything they took, but when the English troops arrived, they were plundered scandalously. I have no way of knowing, but i have often wondered if the authorities paid more attention to Miss Benn's reports thereafter.

I have often pointed out in these fora that Hitler was the greatest continental military ally that we had in Dubya Dubya Two. He continued to believe that the Pas de Calais would be the main invasion site even after the Normandy Invasion had taken place. The coast there was bristling with heavy fortifications (as the Canadians learned to their cost at Dieppe in 1942), and the Fifteenth Army was huge and very well equipped. Hitler wanted to believe that the Allies would attack head-on where he was best prepared to defend, and it was a simple matter to continue to convince him of what he wanted to believe. George "I never met an officer as brilliant as me" Patton helped in the decpetion by setting up a "ghost" Third Army in Merry Old which was, at the time, just a bunch of GIs in jeeps who rode around broadcasting radio reports in the clear--Hitler and Jodl ate it up, because it told them what they wanted to hear.

Even after the breakout from Normandy, Hitler was reluctant release the Fifteenth Army, because he continued to believe, and to want to believe, that the Allies would land in the teeth of the best defended stretch of coast in Europe. The Fifteenth Army did not finally evacuate their positions until Horrock's XXXth Corps armor columns were racing across Belgium in their rear.

What a complete putz.

as I was saying HCEY ZTCS OPUP PZDI UQRD LWXX FACT TJMB HDVC JJMM ZRPY IKHZ AWGL YXWT MJPQ UEFS ZBCT VRLA LZXW VXTS LFFF AUDQ FBWR RYAP SBOW JMKL DUYU PFUQ DOWV HAHC DWAU ARSW TXCF VOYF PUFH VZFD GGPO OVGR MBPX XZCA NKMO NFHX PCKH JZBU MXJW XKAU OD?Z UCVC XPFT

sorry that was a bit unnecessary but i really wanted to make the point

Did you know, btw, that London N15 is Britain's most ethnically mixed place?



(from pages 24/25 of today's Evening Standard, quoted from a report by Richard Webber at London University College).

From what I understand, Set, they were transmitted signals that just couldn't be decoded.
The Germans were always changing the codebooks, and tweaking the machines (extra wheel etc) JUST in case the Allies were getting near to breaking the old codes.

No-one has ever been able to put their hands on either the revised version code book, or an altered machine.

It just shows how amazing the whole thing was, that one side could invent such a coding device, and the other side ends up building a machine that cracks it. God knows what the outcome of the war would have been, if the allies had never gained possession of these books and machines.

Turing was an amazing man. Such a shame that he died at such a young age (and under such suspicious cicumstances). Imagine what he COULD have achieved, had he lived to a ripe old age.

Seems women's contrubution in code-breaking and the sciences in general, is overlooked (as usual)


Alan Turing Internet

Machines and Men's Minds
Manchester, 1948-1950


The World's First Working Universal Turing Machine
The story of the Manchester computer begins at Bletchley Park in 1944. There, the Cambridge mathematician M. H. A. Newman had determined the function and organised the use of the Colossus electronic machine (see this Scrapbook Page) for breaking the top-level German strategic messages. In 1945 he became Professor of Pure Mathematics at Manchester University, and had ambitious plans to make a powerful new department there. In particular he hoped to take advantage of what had been achieved at Bletchley Park, and turn it to peaceful scientific research.
In 1935 it was Newman who had introduced Turing to the problem which led to the Turing machine , and Newman was the first person ever to read of Turing's universal machine in 1936. Now the war had proved the reliability and speed of electronic digital technology. Max Newman was a pure mathematician, but the war had given him, like Turing, a vision of what an electronic computer could do; and he was fully aware of the power of Turing's universal machine concept.

Unlike Turing, however, he had no interest in getting involved personally in electronic engineering.

Newman acted swiftly. In February 1946, as you can read more about in my book, Newman wrote to von Neumann that he was

hoping to embark on a computing machine section here, having got very interested in electronic devices of this kind during the last two or three years. By about 18 months ago [i.e. soon after D-Day, and a year before von Neumann's EDVAC report] I had decided to try my hand at starting up a machine unit when I got out. It was indeed one of my reasons for coming to Manchester that the set-up here is favourable in several ways... I am of course in close touch with Turing...

Note that at this date, Turing had not even had his ACE proposal accepted by the National Physical Laboratory; these were very early days.

Newman's intention was that the machine would be used for pure mathematical work in algebra and topology, for instance the Four Colour Theorem. The Royal Society approved the project and allocated a grant to Newman for salaries and construction totally £35,000 (about a million pounds in real terms now), with the comment that 'Newman himself, because of his mathematical background and wartime experience, is particularly well qualified for directing this project.'

At that stage, early 1946, Newman expected that that the American Iconoscope would become available as the storage system. But it didn't work. Meanwhile at the radar establishment, TRE, the top electronic engineers had found themselves suddenly out of a job in August 1945. F. C. Williams looked around for a leading-edge project. He soon heard that the possibility of building electronic computers was in the air and that creating a storage system was the main technological bottle-neck.

He had a bright idea for storing digits as bright spots on a screen. The Williams tube converted the cathode-ray-tube into a viable storage medium for digital information.

In November 1946, Williams was appointed to the chair of electrical engineering at Manchester.

Newman's idea was that it would be advantageous to exploit Williams' work on cathode-ray-tube storage, even if, as it then appeared likely, an on-site development would take longer than the Americans. Newman had no rigid ideas about hardware, and simply wanted a computer built by the most effective means possible.

In fact, Williams and his assistant Tom Kilburn did it much quicker than anyone expected. In June 1948 a 'baby machine' was working. It could store 1024 bits on a cathode-ray-tube, enough to demonstrate the stored-program principle in working electronics, the first in the world to do so.

Meanwhile in March 1948, Newman had offered Alan Turing a post. In May 1948 Turing gave up hope of the National Physical Laboratory turning his Universal Machine into practical reality (see this Scrapbook page for the ACE machine that Turing designed). He resigned from the NPL and accepted relocation to Manchester, where this breakthrough had rather unexpectedly been achieved.

The salary for Turing's post came from the Royal Society grant. He was formally 'Deputy Director' of the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory. The grounds for appointing him to this post, as minuted on 15 October 1948, were that

It was in his paper on 'Computable Numbers' (1936) that the idea of a truly universal machine was first clearly set out. This paper was written for purely theoretical and logical purposes, but Mr Turing has had over two years of practical experience since the war, as designer of the ACE machine which is now being constructed at the National Physical Laboratory.
Thus as the time of his appointment, the character of the Manchester machine as a practical version of the Universal Turing Machine was made clear. It was soon totally forgotten.


Who had the Idea?
The Manchester computer of 1948 has been reconstructed for its fiftieth anniversary on 21 June 1998. There is much information on the Manchester site about how Williams and Kilburn succeeded with their cathode-ray-tube storage and built the machine. Brian Napper, who has written the material for the Manchester site, stresses in his page on the general background that the Manchester machine was built with programs loaded in RAM --- the revolutionary idea that defined the computer. But he doesn't explain how Williams and Kilburn got this idea.

It would have been possible for Williams to learn about the stored-program principle in the course of his 1946 work at TRE on the storage mechanism. It was generally in the air after the EDVAC report of 1945; and from Turing's ACE proposal. But what in fact happened, according to Williams (in the Radio and Electronic Engineer, July 1975) was that he learnt the principle from Newman after taking up the Manchester post in December 1946.

With this store available, the next step was to build a computer around it. Tom Kilburn and I knew nothing about computers, but a lot about circuits. Professor Newman and Mr A. M. Turing knew a lot about computers and substantially nothing about electronics. They took us by the hand and explained how numbers could live in houses with addresses and how if they did they could be kept track of during a calculation...
There is an obvious chicken-and-egg interdependence between logical function and practical engineering. Turing and Newman could not embody their ideas without engineers; the engineers would not have known what to build without the mathematicians' ideas.

I feel that the latter aspect is not always given its full weight, but mathematicians are very modest people.



Carry on Computing
At Bletchley Park, in building Bombes and the Colossus, the synthesis had been reasonably harmonious but it was not to be so at Manchester. There was a particularly Mancunian culture clash.

Alan Turing could not 'direct' anything, but he organised the software which made the engineers' machine work. In 1950 he completed a Programming Manual.

See this page of the Manchester history site for a guide to its editions.

Turing's assistants on the software writing were women, Cicely Popplewell and Audrey Bates. This set-up neatly confirmed Manchester stereotypes:

hard soft
engineering mathematics
Williams, Kilburn Newman, Turing
things concepts
north south
Real Manchester Virtual Womanchester

Has much changed? At least women in computing and gender issues are on the agenda.

War Again
The British government desperately wanted atomic bombs. They didn't believe that the Americans would retaliate against a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain, and they wanted to prove that Britain was still in the Big Three. The 1946 McMahon Act in the United States meant that Britain, which had given much to the wartime atomic bomb programme, was denied American co-operation thereafter. In late 1948, the Cold War began in earnest, and it became a British national priority to have computing facilities for the atomic bomb implosion calculation.

A lavish new contract was rushed through to allow Ferranti to build a full-scale machine, the Ferranti Mark 1. The contract specified merely that it would be built to Williams's design.

Newman's priorities for pure mathematics and science were forgotten.



Fifty Years of Hardware
The prototype computer looked like this:


and there are many more on the pictures on the Manchester site, which also includes a history of Manchester computers from 1948 to 1975.

There are also more photographs maintained by Tommy Thomas, one of the engineers of the original project.

Parallel machines
At this period the main rival to the Manchester computer development was the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, England, inaugurated in September 1949. This was the work of Maurice Wilkes, who took as his starting-point the American EDVAC proposals, but was able to beat the Americans at their own game.
Turing gave a talk at its inauguration which anticipated later ideas of program proof, but, in typical disregard for his own reputation, made nothing of it.

There is a description and simulator of the EDSAC by Martin Campbell-Kelly.

A version of Turing's ACE design was built at the National Physical Laboratory after all. The Pilot ACE was inaugurated in November 1950. It is now in the Science Museum, London; which has a picture of it in its virtual gallery of Treasures.



Using the world's first computer
F. C. Williams himself had no interest in the use of the machine he had built. Speaking in an oral history of Pioneers of Computing, Science Museum, 1976, he said:
Well let's be clear right from the start, I never have been interested in computing, and I'm still not interested in computing. What I'm interested in is computers. I'm an engineer, I define the computer right from square one as a device which was designed to facilitate the performance of mathematics, the greater part of which would be very much better not done, and I've never changed that view really...
Users were seen as rather a nuisance while the machine was in development, but Newman immediately found a genuine mathematical problem that could be run on the prototype Manchester computer, and thereby rescued a little of the originally intended function for the machine in pure mathematics.

Did you want to book the full breakfast as well?

Thank god we still out number the Scots.

Do you wear pink knickers smorgie? If these guys can steal your thread with their "smalls", their underpants being objects of derision, I don't see why you can't play your trump card.