[2975] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Turing Bombe story
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marcus Leech)
Thu Jul 16 12:27:34 1998
From: "Marcus Leech" <Marcus.Leech.mleech@nt.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 11:02:58 -0500 (EDT)
[Reprinted with permission, from Nortel "Newsweb", July 6, 1998.
Original Article by Tony Ford, Nortel UK. Reformatted for the list]
BLETCHLEY PARK, U.K. - The chance to preserve a part of the U.K.'s intell=
ectual
heritage has been given a financial boost from Nortel (Northern Telecom)=
=2E
It has donated =A315,000 ($24,000) to the industrial and historical museu=
m at
Bletchley Park, Bedfordshire to help support the rebuilding of the =
Turing Bombe, the Allies' answer to Germany's encoding machine Enigma.
Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, about 50 miles northwest of London, wa=
s one
of the best-kept secrets of World War II. It was the code breaking
headquarters of the intelligence forces that used primitive but powerful=
computers to crack the Germans' Enigma code.
At the height of the war, 12,000 staff worked non-stop deciphering =
transmissions from every kind of enemy operation. Their work is =
acknowledged as shortening the war by some two years, saving many
hundreds of thousands of lives. =
The German Enigma machine encoded messages that could then be transmitted=
in Morse code, which was easy to intercept but extremely hard to deciphe=
r
from Enigma's 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations.
Even after the war, Bletchley Park's role stayed top secret until the lat=
e
1970s. The code-breaking equipment - a unique first step towards today's=
computers - was mostly sold off as scrap or scattered among the
collections of a few interested individuals. Now, thanks to the work of
the British Computer Society's Computer Conservation Society, that
history is being reclaimed and restored. =
The main project is to rebuild the Turing Bombe decoder. Named both after=
Alan Turing, a brilliant young British mathematician whose pioneering wo=
rk =
laid the basis for modern computing, and the ominous ticking noise
it made during decoding, the Turing Bombe could crack a German code
in 15 minutes. Today a Pentium PC would need 18 hours - or 72
times slower than the Bombe designed more than 50 years ago. =
Nortel's support for the Turing Bombe rebuild goes further than just a
cash donation. Current and retired employees from Nortel Harlow
Labs have been working to trace obsolete components from industry source=
s.
They have also devised a method for original Bombe blueprints to be
safely reproduced before they deteriorate too far.
Dr. Allan Fox, managing director of Harlow Labs, presented Tony Sale, =
Bletchley Park museum director, with an original wartime Post Office
savings book listing Nortel's gift, together with an initial donation
by IT company, Quantel. =
=
In turn, as a memento, Tony Sale presented Allan Fox with an actual Enigm=
a =
message intercepted by Bletchley on Nov 1, 1944, which detailed German
army fuel supplies. =
Guests then viewed the Bombe room, where Allan Fox was invited to type
in the first few letters of the intercept message on an
Enigma machine to show it working in action.
Among the guests of honour at the event were ex-members of the WRNS
(Women's Royal Naval Service) who operated the original Bombe, and
were able to relive their wartime days at Bletchley Park. =
Bletchley Park's role is to figure in a U.K. Channel 4 TV series this aut=
umn,
and in a film due out next year called The Enigma Code. And an English
Heritage plaque is to be unveiled to at Alan Turing's London birthplace.=
-- =
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Marcus Leech Mail: Dept 8M70, MS 012, FITZ
Systems Security Architect Phone: (ESN) 393-9145 +1 613 76=
3 9145
Security and Internet Solutions Fax: (ESN) 395-1407 +1 613 76=
5 1407
Nortel Technology mleech@nortel.ca
-----------------Expressed opinions are my own, not my employer's------
