A little more than a year after the reconstruction of one of the electro-mechanical "Bombe" cryptanalysis machines at Bletchley Park, a fifteen-year project has finally seen the re-creation of the Bombe's electronic successor, Colossus. I saw Colossus while it was still in the early stages of reconstruction, back in about 1999/2000, while being guided on a tour of Bletchley Park by the head of the project, Tony Sale.
If I remember right, the reconstruction of the Colossus machine was in part possible because British Telecom still had a load of valves from obsolete telephone exchange switches. The valves were one of the high-tech parts of Colossus... when we saw it, I have to say that a lot of the visible workings appeared to be made of pram-wheels and ticker-tape.
It was a fascinating tour, and one I'd strongly recommend whether or not you're a computer buff, security geek or crypto nerd. Apart from anything else, there are so many human stories woven in and out of the technological substrate. For instance, there's a wonderful story about an embroidered quilt which now hangs in the main building (at least, I assume it still does). I won't blow the secret, but suffice it to say that the quilt - made by someone who lived at Bletchley Park as a small child - reveals the difficulty of keeping any such large undertaking entirely secret from those living with it day by day.
Many of the people who worked at Bletchley have either died without ever revealing "what they did in the War", or have only finally told their relatives many decades later. I've been told, for instance, that one of my late aunts worked there, spending hours at a time sitting transcribing Morse radio traffic through headphones. Apparently a permanent side-effect of her work was that, if she heard someone tapping their fingers on a table, or clicking the button of a ballpoint pen, she couldn't help mentally 'transcribing' the resulting random dots and dashes into gibberish text... which must have been quite wearing. I mean, imagine sitting on a train and reading advertising hoardings as they flash past the window - but finding that they are all written in anagrams.
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