Bletchley Park WW2 archive heading online | IT PRO Bletchley Park, Britain’s code-breaking headquarters during World War II, will be making more than a million documents available to the public online. The project is expected to take up to five years to complete and will be carried out at the Milton Keynes base by the Bletchley Park Trust with the assistance of HP, which will be providing the software to transfer the documentation onto the web. HP will also be providing training and technical support, according to Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust. “I think there will be a lot of interest in it,” Greenish told IT PRO. “What will be of particular interest is the card index, which comprises of literally thousands of thousands of cards with summaries of the messages on them. I think that is something new and researchers will be interested in that, I’m quite sure of that.” He explained that not much is known about a significant portion of the documentation stored in the archive. “There is literally rooms full of it and it’s not until we’ve actually gone through it all that we will understand exactly what we have got,” Greenish added. Bletchley Park has been operating as a museum since 1994, but much of the extensive archive is inaccessible to the public. Once the project is completed, some of the documents will be available to view for free, while others will need to be paid for. During the war, codebreakers at the site looked to crack German messages sent through the Enigma machine. The process was extremely difficult in the early days of World War II, given the very slim chances of figuring out what the enciphered letters were, but genius mathematician and computing legend Alan Turing developed an idea that led to the creation of the Bombe – an electro-mechanical machine that cut the odds drastically.
Thanks for the info Peter - a major project indeed! It must have already started as I found two of the intercepts relative to my Regiment in the National Archives' files. Cheers, Gerry
This same notice, announced by HP: Bletchley Park and HP partnership Jan. Nice to see a US website acknowledge Alan Turing as the father of the modern computer! Actually this is copied from the English BP site, hurrah for HP. Bill and Melissa turned them down, even with all their spare billions. Don't they know Information Technology and one of the first computers was invented there and nazi Tyranny was partly defeated there.
Growing up not far from Bletchley I was always aware that something big and secret happened there during the war. I wasn't sure what but I had the feeling it was connected to Hanslope Park which was also close by and is run by the Foreign and Commonwealth office. Its really great to have a childhood mystery cleared up for me.
My Bedroom used to be one of the old Bombe storage rooms and my canteen used to be Hut 5 I think, Naval Intelligence ~ Happy Days. Guess who I worked for all my working life........ Rgds Orielbenfro ORIEL a welsh window on a surname