Friday, 15 July 2011

Bletchley Park: Getting A Gong From The Queen … 

Oh, well, now THERE’S a thing …

Seriously …

You know, you’ve probably worked out, by now, that I’m a bit of a technology fan.

Admittedly, rather a skint one who rather have more tech than he’s got, but none the less a tech fan.

And over the years … ?

One that’s taken something of an interest in the history of these things.

Now, in the UK, you can’t actually do that, without mentioning two names.

One of those, of course, is the late Alan Turing, the man whose On Computable Numbers paper defined computers, back in 1936, and who went on to build them.

The other … ?

The other name was the place honoured by the Queen, today.

Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire.

Now, in case you didn’t know, Bletchley Park was the site of Britain’s code breakers, during World War 2: including Alan Turing, I should add.

The code breakers based there worked on cracking the German Enigma code, along with the Lorenz ciphers, and assorted others. And are generally agreed to have shortened the war by a number of years.

So seeing the news, today, that the Queen has unveiled a statue, and paid tribute to the Bletchley Park codebreakers … ? Was something I know that I, certainly, felt was nice to see.

Now …

I wonder if that posthumous medal for Dr Turing’s on its way …



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