New job … and Station X
I have gotten a temp job doing exactly what I was doing 2 years ago, for disability services — sitting in a dungeon at uni installing software onto computers, it should last a couple of weeks, and will be reasonably fun in the process.
This last weekend I went to London to visit my good friend Heliomass (and a few others in the process) many interesting things were seen including Kew Gardens (all 300 acres there of) and the main point of the trip: Station X.
Station X, AKA Bletchly park is an extremely interesting place, known for it’s WW2 code breaking efforts. It held some of the foremost mathematical geniuses of it’s time, and was so significant it housed some operations only declassified in 2002. Many believe the efforts there turned the war, or at the least shortened it by up to 18 months.
It was the birth (and death) place of Colossus, the worlds first electronic programable computer, which was (depending on who you ask) either 1 or 4 decades or more ahead of it’s time, and has been rebuilt from photos over the last 15 years, I have seen it running in full working order.
Photos:
September 5th, 2008 at 0929
Thanks for the update and photos. Station X is somewhere I’d really like to see - but replacing all those valves must have been a nightmare!
September 5th, 2008 at 1754
Replacing valves … that’s the funny thing — they were perfectly reliable — they are only a problem when turning them on and off, and as they never actually turned the things off, it was all good.
there were a fascinating number of modern concepts used in those machines. For example, the machine goes through a message once per second roughly, looping (literally a paper loop) through the message ad-infinitum, the clock pulse is generated by the sprocket holes in the paper tape. The output analysis goes to teliprinter however to make sure that the message hangs around for long enough for the printer to get it, they implemented what we now call double buffering, using relays.
BTW, the critical path for the machine actually turns out to be the speed at which the paper tape can hold together at.