Boffins Beat Belligerents - tb >> .
Espionage, Intelligence - SatOf >> .
Female Agents of SOE - tb >> .
Espionage, Intelligence - SatOf >> .
Female Agents of SOE - tb >> .
Espionage Act - USA ..
GCHQ & Bletchley: Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says. Bletchley still played an important role, and GCHQ had a significant influence in other conflicts.
GCHQ, known as Britain's listening post, was set up on 1 November 1919 as a peacetime "cryptanalytic" unit. During WW2, staff were moved to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to decrypt Nazi Germany's messages including, most famously of all, the Enigma communications. This provided an inside view of Nazi orders and movements.
The work was kept secret for decades but an official history of British intelligence in the war would later say it had shortened the conflict by two to four years and without it the outcome would have been uncertain.
GCHQ & Bletchley: Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says. Bletchley still played an important role, and GCHQ had a significant influence in other conflicts.
GCHQ, known as Britain's listening post, was set up on 1 November 1919 as a peacetime "cryptanalytic" unit. During WW2, staff were moved to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to decrypt Nazi Germany's messages including, most famously of all, the Enigma communications. This provided an inside view of Nazi orders and movements.
The work was kept secret for decades but an official history of British intelligence in the war would later say it had shortened the conflict by two to four years and without it the outcome would have been uncertain.
The machine was an early attempt to automate code-cracking and, due to its complexity, was named after the illustrator W Heath Robinson.
The World War Two codebreaking machine, which went into operation at Bletchley Park in June 1943, is acknowledged as the inspiration for Colossus, the world's first programmable computer.
The Colossus, the world's first programmable computer, was designed off the back of work to try to improve the Heath Robinson.
Even after the launch of Colossus in 1944, the Heath Robinson continued to develop and was used in tackling messages sent between Hitler and the German High Command.
At the end of World War Two there were two "super Robinsons" in use and another two under development. The machine was operational until the 1950s.
The Colossus, the world's first programmable computer, was designed by a team led by Tommy Flowers at the General Post Office in London in late 1943.
It was programmed to run algorithms used to decipher messages sent among German High Command, who had encrypted them using their Lorenz cipher system.
After moving Colossus to Bletchley, in rural Buckinghamshire, the first Lorenz message was cracked on 5 February 1944, reducing the time it took to break the cipher from weeks to hours.
Bletchley Park was the wartime home of the Government Code & Cypher School which broke the German Enigma and Lorenz codes
The Colossus, the world's first programmable computer, was designed by a team led by Tommy Flowers at the General Post Office in London in late 1943.
It was programmed to run algorithms used to decipher messages sent among German High Command, who had encrypted them using their Lorenz cipher system.
After moving Colossus to Bletchley, in rural Buckinghamshire, the first Lorenz message was cracked on 5 February 1944, reducing the time it took to break the cipher from weeks to hours.
Bletchley Park was the wartime home of the Government Code & Cypher School which broke the German Enigma and Lorenz codes
The mansion dates from the 19th Century but the intelligence centre was rapidly assembled with mainly wooden structures in 1939 where mathematicians including Alan Turing and Bill Tutte worked.
After the war, two of the 10 Colossus machines ended up at the government's new GCHQ in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The other eight were dismantled.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.