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Articles: When TheNeil Met The Colossus
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When TheNeil Met The Colossus
It sometimes bizarre what people pick up on. At other times it's not so bizarre and, having lived with me for more than 10 minutes, Mrs TheNeil has become atuned to my way of thinking and the fanatical devotion that I have to certain subjects and items. Apple Macs constitute the bulk of my manicness but there are others and I've also spent far too long reading up on, investigating and documenting the history of computing. It was for this reason that my little flower of violence (she's got a well developed streak of violence running through her petite frame) types 'computer museum' into Google and set in motion a course of events that would see Britain's first digital computer come face to face with Britain's greatest programmer*.
*'Britain's greatest programmer' referring to the greatest Britain's greatest living programmer called TheNeil who codes in Delphi/C# and is fanatical about Macs.
Note: This is part history lesson, part social commentary, part travel guide, part waffle (if you've read any of my other stuff then you'll know just how far we can potentially go off topic).
Some Light Background Reading...
The history of digital computing is a big subject in its own right and I've whiled away far too many rainy afternoons writing various bits and pieces on the subject. Germany had entered the nascent computing industry with Zuse's Z3 machine and there were various projects being carried out around the world in the years leading up to world war II. The advent of war though had forced a quantum leap in computing and processing power and Britain wasn't excluded from this with the result being Colossus.
Colossus was a monster of a machine but it didn't just happen over night. Yes dear reader, it's another quick dip into history with various assumptions, half-truths and glossing over - kind of like everything else I've ever written really. This'll be brief so no need to cancel too many appointments.
Although just over 20 years had passed between the first and second world wars, the art of war had progressed enormously. This progression happened on many fronts but the most worrying (to the British) was the advances in cryptogrophy and the inability to reveal enemy intelligence. The big breakthrough for Nazi Germany had been the adoption of the Enigma cipher which encoded (and decoded) plain text into complete and utter gibberish. Germany believed Enigma to be unbreakable and, at first glance, they would appear to be correct. A single character passed through three code wheels that transposed that character into another, transposed that character into another and then transposed that character into another. Difficult enough but then the wheels would move between each character. To add even more to the confusion was an additional plugboard that could be set up in, literally, millions of different ways.
Enigma was nigh on impossible to break but the Polish secret service had started to make in-roads into the task and shared their work with the British. This led figures such as Alan Turing to refine and develop 'Bombes' (automated machines that searched for the encryption codes), crib sheets and all manner of tricks to beat the encryption. Amazingly the British suceeded (despite various changes in technique adopted by the Nazis) and their base at Bletchley Park became the centre of Britain's encryption service. This was fine for Enigma (and even the later 'Shark' variation adopted by the German navy) but the German high command didn't rely entirely on the fabled encoder.
Not For The Common Man
High ranking German officials (including Hitler himself) used the far more sophisticated Lorenz machine. Instead of three code wheels, Lorenz had 12 as well as a raft of extra features that increased the encryption complexity almost exponentially. Turing's Bombes simply couldn't handle the job and the task of breaking Lorenz fell to Max Newman who set about designing a machine that could do the job. Newman knew what he needed to do but several aspects of his original design simply couldn't be realised using the predominant valve technology available at the time. He knew that he needed help and called upon the services of Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers.
Flowers quickly advocated the use of the far more reliable relay technology and the pair developed Colossus, a machine capable of breaking the Lorenz cipher. Colossus was more than just a code breaker though and, unlike the Bombes, was capable of being programmed to perform many tasks (rather than just one dedicated task). And so Colossus was born and started processing in January 1944, reducing the time to break Lorenz from weeks to mere hours. Even at this speed though, there were still far too many messages for just one machine to handle and the original Colossus Mark 1 led to an improved Mark 2 (in June 1944) and, at the end of the war Bletchley Park boasted ten of these marvels of the modern age.
For Colossus though the end of the war did not spell the start of a glittering career. The victorious Churchill had always been proud of his codebreakers and their achievements but never would their work be revealed during the hostilities, and he didn't intend to let their work be recognised after the war (for whatever twisted reasons all politicians have for keeping things secret). Of the ten machines installed, eight were totally dismantled at Bletchley and the other two found homes at Eastcote before moving onto GCHQ and then being dismantled in 1960. With its existence having never been disclosed, it was as if Colossus had never even existed.
But You've Seen It?
The second world war was long over but it wasn't until the 1970s that information started to appear that hinted to the work and achievements of the people stationed at Bletchley Park. By the 1980s though Tommy Flowers and several other members of the orginal design team had started to talk openly about their work on Colossus and so we move towards the modern day.
Having been shrouded in secrecy, the Bletchley Park site itself had fallen into disrepair and was threatened with demolition until a campaign to save it from the property developers was successful. To this was added the tantalising possibility of rebuilding Colossus and a group of dedicated engineers and enthusiasts set about collating all of the available information, tracking down the design team and putting together a perfect, working reproduction of the monumental machine.
Meanwhile Back In Holiday-land...
So Colossus was back in the world (even if most of the world just didn't care) and Mrs TheNeil had arranged to drag me down to the Bletchley Park museum but what was there to find there? What was this piece of pure computing history actually like? Ok, we're into guided tour mode now so please keep your hands inside the document and take as many photographs as you like, but save any questions until the end of the tour.
I won't go into great detail regarding the inner workings of the British transport/hotel system but, suffice to say, Mrs TheNeil and I ended up on Bletchley station at 10am on a crisp October morning in 2005 (and it wasn't raining)(for a change). Given its historical significance it came as something of a shock to actually walk up to the reknowned Bletchley Park. This once jewel in Allied intelligence arsenal, made up of a manor house and various huts and buildings resides...in the middle of a housing estate. Down a couple of streets and a tarmaced alley and we nearly walked past the little white wooden hut that was the entrance. We paid, got our little talking tour guide stick things (quite neat actually, type a number into the blue phone style wand and it tells you all about the exhibit - the novelty does wear off quite quickly though and we spent most of the day trying to batter each other with them) and set off on the big adventure.
This wasn't a guided tour so we were free to roam but the map was hopelessly useless and we wandered from building to building. This sounds like fun but in reality it was hugely depressing. Bletchley's heyday had been in the 1940s and the site hadn't moved on since then. I'd like to clarify that actually. The site hadn't been kept as it was in the 1940s, it simply hadn't been touched at all since the 1940s. A series of derelict, run down wooden huts with peeling paint, boarded up windows and precious little in the way of care and attention. This was a weird experience but let's keep going anyway.
According to the map we'd covered everything except for one main building (which we were saving until after lunch) but so far we'd hardly seen anything (save for an exhibition about the use of pigeons. I managed to break the door (snapped the hinge) on the way out but no-one was about to see so we scarpered - sorry by the way). Mrs TheNeil isn't one to put up with this kind of thing so the map went in the pocket and off we went following our noses. We wandered past more derelict buildings which were all hugely important no doubt but were never signposted, detailed or adorned with any information - now just derelict buildings.
A harrier jump jet was sat on a square of grass (neither the grass or the jet were on the map by the way) and Mrs TheNeil marvelled at the sight of it and the complexity of it. Of course she got annoyed when I refused to give her a leg up so that she could climb on the wing. There were more buildings in the distance so we set off towards what looked like a submarine conning tower nestled in the corner of a derelict office block (I'm not making this up - it really was that bizarre). The tower had come from the 2001 film Enigma (hey, that's a coincidence isn't it) but, like so much of the museum, it had been left to the elements - the wooden construction peeling and warping, the metal substructure rusting away. This is somehow typical of the entire place and is very disconcerting, almost disrespectful in a way.
One Little Sign
Thankfully we'd wandered over to this corner of the world (past abandoned plastic chairs, rubbish, overgrown grass etc. - is this a museum or Beirut?) as there was a tiny little sign that stated 'Colossus Rebuild This Way'. At last, we've found something. Unlike most museums this particular building was in no way 'slick'. The carpet tile covered floor matched the office style used in the decor (i.e. totally uninspiring) and a pathetic single rope seperated the 'proper' route from a huge stack of DEC PDP-11 hardware and a rebuilt Bombe machine (again from the Enigma film). With only myself and Mrs TheNeil there we soon skirted round the rope and started plowing our way through the servers having a look to see what curios had been dumped there ('dumped' is the correct word - this wasn't an exhibit, they really had been just piled there waiting for someone to do something with them). We even had a bit of a play with the bombe. Note: The makers of the Enigma film had rebuilt several bits of equipment for use in the film and had then donated them to the museum. I've seen the film and didn't really pay much attention to them but I'd like to state for the record that never once did the figure of perfection that is Kate Winslet show up or offer to take me behind some bushes. This, probably more than anything else, totally ruined the entire experience for me.
Having tired of looking at storage arrays and playing with plywood models we set off down the grim little corridor, passed various photocopied bits of info (badly photocopied I'd like to add) and entered a little room with a couple of small display cabinets housing parts from the original Colossus. The walls were adorned with photocopies of newspaper clippings and details of the big switch on in June 1996 (various dignitaries, big event etc. etc. etc.) and one wall had two windows through which we could see Colossus itself. We were going to get closer but from this angle we could see the racks of valves and relays, and the very guts of the machine.
It had been nine years since the machine had first been powered up but walking round the corner you couldn't help but think that it was all being disrespected again. The machine itself and the people who'd built (and re-built) it were marvellous but the exhibit as a whole was just very amateurish. I know that it's shallow and facile but this should have been a slick affair with professional displays and the information and facts displayed on high quality stands - not some cut out bits of paper mounted on sugar paper and coated with sticky back plastic. This building housed one of the most important pieces of British computing history ever and here it was, a forgotten, derelict office block with grimy carpet tiles, polystyrene ceiling tiles (covered in green mould in some places), and a set of information that totally failed to convey the importance of the situation. Note: I'm not having a go at the people who put the display together. I'm sure that they worked hard, gave 100% and did the very best that they could with the materials and resources available. That an exhibit as important as this though should be so starved of funds is inexcusable and, quite frankly, deeply distressing. We'll come back to this later though.
Rumble In The (Weed) Jungle
Despite the mould and all of the other negatives, Colossus was still standing there and an impressive sight it was. Filling a 20 foot by 20 foot room, the machine was spinning and clunking along while a couple of enthusiasts tinkered, answered questions and genuinely seemed err...enthusiastic about it. The giant reel of paper tape wound its way through the optical reader at the same 5000 characters per second that it had during the war and Colossus reliably counted how many times it had read it (generating a great 'clunk' every second as the array of relays all switched so as to update the array of bulbs consitituting the display).
It might not have been calculating shell flight paths, breaking codes or battling Kasparoff at chess but it here was a real piece of computing history. This wasn't a picture on a website or in a book but was real and physical. It was archaic, lumbering and totally outdated in every single way but it was something totally unique and it was easy to marvel at the brilliance that had gone into its creation. Even Mrs TheNeil was transfixed (and she's usually bored stupid by this kind of stuff) and started firing questions at me: "But how does it work?", "What's it doing?", "Can we go to eBay on it?". And, I'll admit, I didn't have the faintest idea (well, apart from the eBay question - 'nope').
I don't consider myself to be the greatest expert on hardware but I'm more than happy to strip down a machine, dissect it, re-assemble it and even, on the odd occasion, dig out the old soldering iron. I know how silicon chips work, how transistors (and even valves) work, how modern machines operate. I understand von Neumann architecture, parallel processing, networking, quantum computing and a wealth of other technologies and theories inside out and upside down but this thing had me well and truly beat. This behemoth from the past that should have been, to a 21st century IT person, akin to an abacus, was a huge sprawling mass of pure electronics that made no sense and provided absolutely no reference points to which I could relate. Input (the tape), output (the light bulb array) and processing (the rest of it) were as far as my brain could understand. But how can you...? It can't be possible to...? Where does the...?
Well I'm Lost
I like to think of myself as being 'well above average' when it comes to computing (professional programmer, IT support, university educated, genius etc.) but even though I can happily rebuild a floppy drive, replace memory chips, wash motherboards and bring the dead back to life (in computing terms, I'm not a closet Frankenstein) I was totally non-plussed as to how on Earth this thing could do anything. I understood the broadest of principles though and I knew where this machine stood in the history of computing (we're talking pre-ENIAC here - hardly an insiginificant achievement). It had played a vital role in ending a war, saved lives (in an information type way, not in a Lassie type way), advanced computer science and made it possible to create the black monolith that I'm typing this on now.
The mechanics were beyond me but this machine was still awe inspiring. The sheer size and scale of it. The ease and reliability that it seemed to work with. The perfect synchronicity and elegance that started at one end of this lump of metal and glass and swept all the way across to the other end. It may have lacked an 'Intel Inside' sticker, a 10/100mpbs network connection, half a gig of RAM, even a keyboard and a monitor, and yes, it might have needed to be programmed by being physically rewired, but this thing was a truly marvellous piece of engineering and brain power.
To the other small group of people it obviously meant different things to each of them. To the old war heroes (of which there were plenty - all over the whole museum, not just stood in between me and a the machine) it was a symbol of what made Britain great (once upon a time, long, long ago). To the teenagers and the children it meant bugger all. To the enthusiasts it was part of them (I certainly know that feeling). To the brain dead morons it was a big pile of electronic bits that did something. To me though it was history brought to life, a holy grail, a glimpse into a subject that has fascinated me for years. Kind of like discovering a group of fairies at the bottom of the garden (Note: The winged Tinkerbell type fairies, and not the public convenience, light on their feet type fairies). Even Mrs TheNeil knew what this meant to me and I like to think that she shared and understood a little bit more than your common or garden oink.
So we turned and left and I knew that I'd spend the rest of the day coming up with questions and wondering "I wonder if I could just get [insert name of outdated and totally useless piece of hardware/component here]?". Back we trudged towards the manor house that was at the centre of the Bletchley Park site and we once again looked at the run down huts and the grim and uncared for buildings. The map had proved to be totally useless and unreadable and everything that it pointed out either didn't exist or we couldn't find. Mrs TheNeil dared me to try a locked door and we did...only to have it open.
Desolate and Derelict
Little more than a concrete bunker with a couple of skylights (and a few notes scrawled on the wall indicating that this had once been some sort of smoking room) we found a family stood amidst a ramshackle collection of plastic office and canteen chairs (those really old ones with the single preformed chair/back arrangement and four spindly black metal legs poking out) looking at another film prop bombe. The walls had some more laminated photocopies explaining how it worked but, again, I got the impression that it was all the work of enthusiasts on a budget. The text described how the bombe worked, how it identified patterns in a menu and how this tied in with the crib sheet. Never did it actually explain what a menu is, what a crib sheet is or offer any real form of simple example - even now I have no idea.
The family left (after 'father' gave a rather half-assed and wrong explanation of how the Enigma cipher worked) and Mrs TheNeil and I once again poked about a bit and tried desperately hard to understand what the hell the information on display actualy meant. Mrs TheNeil is no slouch in this department (Sodoku and crossword champion of our house) and surely, combined with my own towering intellect and encyclopeadiac knowledge, we'd have this figured out in a few seconds. Nope. It was all gibberish and this only re-inforced the impression that the everything had been done on the cheap. Don't get me wrong, the information was probably hugely brilliant and 100% accurate but you needed an in depth knowledge of the subject (and probably an advanced degree in cryptogrophy) to understand it. It had been created by the enthusiasts who had played such a vital part in making the museum possible but their enthusiasm had made them blind to the fact that not everybody is as knowledgeable as they are (I do it myself when it comes to my field of expertise - everybody does it in fact). This little concrete bunker with its collection of chairs certainly created an atmosphere but it didn't feel as if it had been by design but more by chance. It perfectly followed the pattern of abandonment that was exhibited elsewhere. It was a sad indictment of how little modern Britain cared about this corner of its wartime past and it was in stark contrast to the vast amounts spent on commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII (both in terms of money and effort). This little forgotten monument to British ingenuity was about to crumble away into the ground and become lost for all time. I digress though (yet again).
Leaving the bunker behind us we decided on lunch and this was yet another bizarre experience of the bizarrest order. Set in another wooden hut, a canteen that sported some familiarly modern elements (fridges, coffee machines etc.) seemed to fuse the past with the present. Pre-packed sandwiches rubbed shoulders with inch think crockery and (surely) antique furniture played host to Gore-Tex clad diners. It was a very strange fusion of the the old and the new and everybody ate in a typically English self-conscious manner. All eye contact avoided, all conversation strictly of the hushed and mumbled type. I thought I'd left places like this behind in my childhood (or Bognor Regis)(I had cruel, cruel parents). Sadly it seems I hadn't.
We Will Fight Them In...A Museum
The afternoon spell had just one thing left to conquer - the eponymous Block B. According the map (oh God) this included Enigma exhibits and a bone-fide computer museum that 'charted the history of computing from Colossus to the modern day'. See? Nirvana for a saddo like me. Firstly we got sidetracked and ended up in a different building hoping to have a quick look at the museum of the cinema camera (well I though it sounded remotely interesting). Sadly it was shut for the day and we walked into an entire room devoted to Churchill (of the Winston variety and not of the car insurance variety). "This is all my personal collection. Please ask about any item you like" said a dessicated voice from the corner (blimey, I've just written the word 'dessicated' for possibly the first time ever, aside from situations related to coconut). We mumbled 'thanks, we will' and scurried past. Neither Mrs TheNeil nor myself has any interest in Winston Chruchill so we wandered about a bit (quickly) and marvelled at how, whenever anyone came in, the old guy in the corner said exactly the same thing in exactly the same voice (I reckon he was animatronic).
We fled the museum of Winston Churchill and headed onwards for Block B, passing a US SWAT guy and a member of the SAS (yes, it was one of those days). A squad of Nazi paratroopers had setup a tent outside the entrance to Block B but we flashed our forged passports and headed across the border into Switzerland (oops, wandered into Alistair Macleen territory a bit there).
The Enigma That Is...Enigma
Unlike the rest of the museum, Block B seemed to have been lavished with care, attention and, most importantly, money. Glass cases housed artifacts and even managed to have cards explaining what everything was. Professionally produced charts and stands showed timelines, developement charts and even went some way into explaining how Enigma code be broken without having to resort to brute force. A recreation of a German communication bunker had been built and even sported a genuine Enigma cipher machine. All far more in keeping with modern museums - we liked this kind of thing very muchly (yes I know, we're shallow fools). Even the walls and floors had been rescued from the grime and decay that had seemed to cover everything we'd seen in the morning.
The cases held wonder after wonder and, after just standing open jawed for a good hour looking at a real Lorenz machine (Jesus that thing is big...and amazingly complex), we studied another Enigma cipher. Housed in its own glass case this was far more 'up close' than the one in the bunker recreation. Here was another fabled piece of history. Real German soldiers had used this machine to send real messages to other real German soldiers. Well I found it exciting anyway.
We wandered around looking at this and pouring scorn on that (I know that Colossus was the first British digital computer but it wasn't the world's first digital computer - Konrad Zuse certainly got their first and the US's ABC might also have beaten it too. I tried to find someone to complain to about this but failed) before we found what, for me, was going to be one of the highlights of the entire visit - the history of computing museum. I've set myself up for this one so you just know that I'm going to be disappointed don't you?
But Mine's Bigger Than That
The brochure/map had built this up as being the history of computing from Colossus to now. If only that was the case. A few glass cabinets housed various parts and how they'd changed over the years (memory, hard disks, the optical drives etc.) but they were sadly devoid of information. Yes the artifacts (for want of a better word) were there but there was precious little information and certainly nothing as advanced as little information cards. We were sliding from the brilliant Enigma displays back towards bombe's concrete bunker. Equipment was piled everywhere and underneath the display cabinets were cardboard boxes filled with various bits of hardware, all of which could have happily come home with me (a hand wrapped memory core looked especially tempting - I did manage to resist by the way).
I was having no problem gazing at the bits and pieces displayed before me but Mrs TheNeil was starting to get a bit bored of looking at various, seemingly, random bits of 'stuff' (to use her description for the assembled bits and pieces). "What's that?" - It's an old hard disk platter. "But how does it work?" - Well, the disk spins up and the head moves back and forth reading and writing the magnetic impulses stored on the disk's surface. "Is our hard disk like that?" - Well kind of except that ours isn't 14" across and can't be removed. "What's that?"... Admittedly I didn't mind this one bit as I was in my element but I quickly became aware that there was more than one pair of eyes on me.
"You know what you're talking about don't you?" said the man stood next to me. By the wide eyed look on his face he was truly amazed to have found someone who actually knew what all of this crap was (because God knows there was precious little in the way of staff to ask). Sadly his wife then dragged him away so I missed my chance to shine but Mrs TheNeil was entranced (as ever) so we carried on, ignoring the idiots who were spouting inane nonsense ("Blimey hasn't it all changed?" shouted one woman who obviously hadn't got the faintest idea what she was looking at. I know this because she was looking at a cabinet dedicated to a dissected CD-ROM drive).
Nerds! Run!
The majority of the room was given over to several benches filled with various home computers (and a few others) that had been thrust upon the British populace over the past 25 years. An Apple II was looking slightly worse for wear and the Mac 512k next to it had been covered in silver tape to stop anyone either resetting it or ejecting the floppy disk. This, like a few of the other machines, was powered up and a tiny scamp was enjoying a game of Frogger. He soon cleared off when the scary, spiky haired man started peering around the back of the machine and declared "Nah, it's only a 512". A couple more olders Macs (no iMacs) and then we were into the 'portables'.
Actually we had to skip these and come back to them later as a group of museum 'experts' were all sat about discussing something or other in their nasally nerd voices. As soon as I heard "Yes well my friend has just installed Windows 3. I told him..." I was off. No way am I associating with nerds of that calibre. When they'd gone we looked at an Osbourne 1 (the first 'portable' machine weighing in at 25lbs and only able to be powered from the mains supply), an early Compaq Portable, a couple of other 'portables' that I didn't recognise before getting on to a Sun workstation and a Silicon Graphics Indy (just like mine but with a webcam attached). There were handy information cards sellotaped to the desk in front of each machine but you just felt, yet again, that this wasn't really professionally done.
We skipped the Spectrums (one of which had been partially disassembled and was 'displayed' by being blu-tacked to the desk) and headed for the Acorn machines where I trawled my bottonless pit of a memory and managed to write a quick BASIC program (10 PRINT "Hello Nicole "; 20 GOTO 10) (how sad is that I a) remembered how to do it and b) quoted it here) on a BBC B with several keys missing and then got all excited because it had a 6502 second processor fitted (just like the one that had somehow found its way into our house while I was growing up).
And that was it, the history of computing from Colossus to the present day - obviously all of that other rubbish involving IBM, UNIVAC and etc. was unimportant. I'm probably being over-critical but, while interesting to the fanatic like me, it was hardly all that it claimed to be and only added to the amateurish feeling. That people could use and touch these machines was certainly commendable but the wear and tear on them was obvious and the 'enthusiast over professional' feeling that had typified so much of the whole site was very much evident. Blu-tack to display a disassembled machine? Sellotape holding down information cards? Silver tape covering up a Mac! It's easy to be critical but these machines should have been in glass cases, away from prying, grubby, ham-fisted fingers. Professionally presented cards should have given salient facts about them. And boxes of peripherals and hardware should have been far from sight.
But You're Doing It Wrong
I collect Macs (and only Macs) and I care and cherish my machines, cleaning them and restoring them to as near original condition as possible (I even power them up sometimes)(I know, sad isn't it). The fact that I had more machines that this museum was one thing (even Mrs TheNeil loudly said "Well they haven't got a Lisa have they?" - she's a joy at times) but these it struck me that little thought went into the practicalities of making them accesible to the masses. It's a nice idea to have the machines on display and capable of being used (and it's easy to picture the meeting where someone proposed it and everyone thought it was a 'good idea') but I don't believe that it's the best way to preserve them. Perhaps I've got it wrong and these type of things should be handled and used but...whatever.
And that was it (pretty much - I've skipped a few bits involving a submarine model (separate to the submarine conning tower), an exhibit about the taking of a bridge, and Bletchley Manor itself (trust me, didn't miss much), and some other tawdry collections (a 'toy' collection, a collection of model boats etc.)). We'd started out looking quite promising with the blue phone style wands but these were only used in certain parts of the museum (elsewhere you could text numbers via your mobile phone, sometimes it was static information, sometimes no information at all) and the whole site had a very disjointed and uneven quality to it. Looking back it was as though the whole site had been formed by several smaller groups of enthusiastics all coming together but sadly they'd all gone their seperate ways and hadn't worked to create a uniform experience.
The state of disrepair that I've moaned on and on about was hugely distressing (and, in my mind, disrespectful) and the lack of consistency throughout made for a very bizarre experience. I don't want this to be a negative article though as there are several gems at Bletchley Park. The Colossus rebuild is a magnificent achievement (even if its presentation could be better), the Enigma display and exhibits are excellent, but you feel that so much more could be done and that it could seriously benefit from being grabbed by the scruff of the neck and given a complete, uniform overhaul to bring it up to a consistent level. There is much to find interesting at Bletchley Park but it's not easy work by any stretch of the imagination and you have to be prepared for a slightly bizarre (and sometimes disconcerting) day out.
Perhaps the future will bring everything up to a similar level (there was a lot of building work going on and the musuem was about to close for six months the day after we visited) and I seriously hope that this is the case...sadly I don't think that it will be and the Bletchley Park story is one that will never get the respect and memorial that it deserves.
Want To Know More?
Bletchley Park (National Codes Centre) - http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
Codes and Ciphers - http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/
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