Visit Bletchley Park
bletchleypark.org.uk
bletchleypark.org.uk
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
The nuclear bomb was more of a backup plan for if the Germans actually managed to defeat Stalin.
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.
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.
If you find yourself nr Cambridge. Then I highly recommend. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Oh wow, apparently the Bombe was moved to the National Museum of Computing some years ago. TNMOC wins!
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.
> Might not be geographically that near
That was my point.
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.
Since you brought up Paris, I'd compare it to Versailles.
Also visiting Bletchley and then watching the Imitation Game makes it seem like the rushed medical drama from Mitchell and Webb [0]
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.
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.
It is an exhibition about cracking Enigma by the polish mathematicians: M. Rejewski, H. Zygalski and J. Różycki who then, at the begin of the Second World War, handed it over to the Allies.
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.
Wrocław 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.