Restored Bletchly Park Opens 51
Graculus (3653645) writes with this excerpt from the BBC: Codebreakers credited with shortening World War Two worked in Bletchley Park, in structures built to last only a few years. Now, following a painstaking restoration, they have been brought back to life and Wednesday's official opening marks a remarkable turnaround from top secrecy to world wide attraction. With no photographs of the insides to work with, Bletchley Park looked to its most valuable resource — the veterans who worked there. A museum at the site has already been opened.
The structures were once perilously close to being lost forever (until Google stepped in).
Re:Those sheds are sheds (Score:5, Informative)
Right. I've been there, but back in 2002, before they got real money. The people giving tours are obsessed with the buildings. The sheds are, indeed, sheds - temporary buildings built during WWII. Even the manor house isn't architecturally significant. It's only a Grade II listed building, along with about 300,000 other Grade II listed buildings in the UK.
Nobody seems to be interested in the room at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton where von Neumann had the EDVAC [wikipedia.org] built. It's a storeroom now. The EDVAC was a real general purpose computer, with the "von Neumann architecture" all later computers followed.
"Colossus" and the bombes were special-purpose machines for crypto key testing, like the ASICs used for Bitcoin mining. They really belong to the separate history of digital special-purpose machines, such as SIGSALY (digital voice encryption), Reservisor (travel reservations), American Totalizators's racetrack hardware, Teleregister's stock exchange and inventory control hardware, and Western Union's message switching systems. All that stuff is obsolete and forgotten.