They removed the item on Ebay, but here is where you can read about them: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm
Several years ago the British Government finally declassified Bletchley Park, just outside London, where the Allies were successful in breaking the Enigma code, and where the Colossus computer was invented, and "Bombes" did not blow up, but decrypted codes. http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ Bletchley Park is now a museum. Not only do they have lots of Enigma machines of every type (they were not as rare as you might think, and in fact were sold as a commercial device for encoding and decoding business transactions in the 1920s), but the museum has reconstructed a Colossus and have it working, busily "decoding" messages that "arrive". It was utterly amazing that over 10,000 people worked at Bletchley, yet it still remained a secret over forty years later. It showed that the British (and their alies) had stiff, and not loose, upper lips. It was because of this loyalty to security that for a long time the ENIAC got credit for being the first electronic digital computer, although the ENIAC was capable of being reprogrammed to do a number of different tasks, and the Colossus was special purpose. If you read the story in the first link and are wondering why the British Post Office was so involved with creating the Colossus, remember that the British Post Office was also the entity that handled the phone system at the time, and that the Colossus was built from standard telephone components, which also helped in its re-creation fifty years later. md _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
