komunikacja: Bletchley Park

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. During World War II, the estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The GC&CS team of codebreakers included John Tiltman, Dilwyn Knox, Alan Turing, Margaret Rock, Mavis Lever, Harry Golombek, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Donald Michie, Bill Tutte and Stuart Milner-Barry. The team at Bletchley Park, 75% women, devised automatic machinery to help with decryptio…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer. The first electromechanical computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941. Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers, based on plans developed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see Banburismus) contributed to its…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 72

The National Museum of Computing is a UK-based museum that is dedicated to collecting and restoring historic computer systems, and is home to the world's largest collection of working historic computers. The museum is located on Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. It opened in 2007 in Block H – the first purpose-built computer centre in the world, having housed six of the ten Colossus computers that were in use at the end of World War II. As well as first-generation computers including the original Harwell Dekatron computer—the world's oldest working digital computer— and mainframes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the Museum houses an extensive collection of personal computers and…

Evidence: 35 • authority: 72

The Bombe (UK: ) was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The British Bombe was developed from the Polish bomba, which had been designed at the Cipher Bureau by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who had been breaking German Enigma messages for the previous seven years, using it and earlier machines. The initial design of the British bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British…

Evidence: 35 • authority: 72

Evidence: 35 • authority: 72

Evidence: 29 • authority: 72

The Lorenz SZ40, SZ42a, and SZ42b were German rotor stream cipher machines used by the German Army during World War II. They were developed by C. Lorenz AG in Berlin. The model name SZ is derived from Schlüssel-Zusatz, meaning cipher attachment. The machines implemented a Vernam stream cipher. British cryptanalysts, who referred to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as Fish, dubbed the machine and its traffic Tunny (meaning 'tunafish') and deduced its logical structure three years before they saw such a machine. The SZ machines were in-line attachments to standard teleprinters. An experimental link using SZ40 machines was started in June 1941. The enhanced SZ42 machines were brought into…

Evidence: 24 • authority: 72

The history of computing hardware spans developments from early devices used for simple calculations to today's complex computers, encompassing advances in both analog and digital technology. The first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which required the operator to set up the initial values of an elementary arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to obtain the result. In later stages, computing devices began representing numbers in continuous forms, such as by distance along a scale, rotation of a shaft, or a specific voltage level. Numbers could also be represented in the form of digits, automatically manipulated by a mechanism. Although this approach generally r…