A country house and grounds some 50 miles north of London, England, where highly secret work deciphering intercepted German military radio messages was carried out during World War Two. Thousands of people were working there at the end of the war, including a number of early computer pioneers such as Alan Turing.
The nature and scale of the work has only emerged recently, with total secrecy having been observed by all the people involved. Throughout the war, Bletchley Park produced highly important strategic and tactical intelligence used by the Allies, (Churchill's "golden eggs"), and it has been claimed that the war in Europe was probably shortened by two years as a result.
There is an exhibition of wartime code-breaking memorabilia including fragments of a Colossus, a wartime semi-fixed-program vacuum tube calculator at Bletchley Park on alternate weekends.
The Computer Conservation Society (CCS), a specialist group of the British Computer Society, has been asked to help the planning and preparation of a Historical Computer Exhibition there. It is hoped that the CCS will have substantial facilities for storage of old artifacts and for restoration workshops, as well as archive, library and research facilities.
Telephone: Bletchley Park Trust office +44 (908) 640 404 (office hours and open weekends).
(17 Nov 1994)