Communications of the ACM
Funding For Wwii Code-Breaking Centre Bletchley Park
Parts of the Bletchley Park museum are extremely dilapidated.
Credit: wikimedia.org
The U.K. government has provided a £250,000 grant to repair Bletchley Park, where British mathematicians, including Alan Turing, worked to break Germany's Enigma codes in World War II. The site also is where one of the world's first programmable computers, Colossus, resides.
The British prime minister at the time, Winston Churchill, destroyed all evidence of the secret code-breaking program after the war, due to fears the Soviet Union would discover it. But in 1991 the Bletchley Park Trust, formed by historians and ex-codebreakers, saved the site and opened it to the public.
The grant will be used to make repairs to the structure and to buy new computer equipment, but Bletchley Park supporters have more ambitious plans to turn the center into a National Museum of Computing.
From Times Online (U.K.)
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