Was dragged to the above tourist attraction at the weekend. For those unaware, it's the place where German codes were broken during WWII, and early computers developed to speed up the processing of the information. Roughly speaking.
IMO it's mostly pretty tedious. For the astonishing fee of £17.50 you can spend a lot of time looking at replica 1940s offices, and not a great deal more.
However, one surprisingly interesting aspect was the tale of code-breaking during The Great War. I didn't know about the cable cutting war or the setting up of an Admiralty code-breaking department that formed the basis of the WWII operation. Some details here:
"Sometimes things that are not true are included in Wikipedia. While at first glance that may appear like a very great problem for Wikipedia, in reality is it not. In fact, it's a good thing." - Wikipedia.
Code reading, not code breaking. Copies of all three German code books (military, merchant navy, diplomatic) had been captured early in the war (without that the Germans became aware of it). That enabled Room 40 to just read the messages. - When the Germans finally became wary and changed to new codes in 1917, Room 40's ability in code breaking turned out to be nonexistent. - In contrast, the German signals intelligence in Flanders and Neumünster actually managed to break some British codes and read encrypted messages, but only some - and very late in the war.
There was mention of the code breakers within the Admiralty during WW1 on the programme about the 'Battle of Jutland' last Sunday evening. The suggestion was that the service did not entirely trust the information gleaned by the civilian codebreakers.
I think £17.50 adult entry is about par for visitor attractions in the South East, though it must be said that the site include "The National Museum of Computing", which covers a lot more than the code breaking, indeed the model of computer I spent 10 years working on is there as a museum piece....
jh
-- Edited by jch_in_uk on Wednesday 1st of June 2016 12:16:10 PM
there is a very interesting area on the NSA archives site that has a lot of information on the codes used and the code breaking employed in WW1 in the Friedman documents archive
