Whats new at Bletchley Park

[pjb@ny.ubs.com (Paul J. Bell)]

Greetings;

I have just returned from spending a week at Bletchley Park, and have the following 
to report:

On Thursday, 6 June, we had the official switch-on of the rebuilt Colossus. 
There is still a lot of work to be done on Colossus, but that which is there 
is definitely working.  What remains is to fill in the holes to expand it to 
the full five wide system that was the Mark-II machine.

The switch-on was accompanied by a reasonable sized media affair with many 
of the original Colossus users present.  Also in attendance was Tommy Flowers, 
the designer of the original, along with his wife and son.  It was the first 
time that his wife had seen or even heard a lot about Colossus. Dr. Flowers, 
now in his nineties, has a wonderful memory and is a first class gentleman. 
It was a real pleasure to spend some time with him. There was a lot of local 
media coverage, but as yet I have seen nothing in international media, such as 
The (London) Times or the Financial Times, both of whom were represented at the 
switch-on.


During this time, I also installed a new Sun Netra-I server at BP.  This server 
was most kindly donated by Sun Micro Systems.   Many thanks to Scott, who set 
the direction for this gift, and to Matthew, Michael and Steven at Sun-UK for 
all their efforts in making this happen.

A four GByte disk farm was also donated by BoxHill Systems.  Thanks to Carol, 
Ben, Philip, etal at BoxHill for this contribution.

This server will provide Internet and WWW access to BP and will serve as the 
BP mailhost.  Once we have the communications facilities in place, the server, 
elgar, will be on-line.  I'll keep the net informed re: our progress in that 
direction.

Once on-line, Tony Sale has a lot of very cool  ideas for web pages, including 
an interactive, GUI-based  Enigma emulation.  Tony and James Bristow also plan 
to move their existing Web pages to elgar.

The plans to make BP into a one-of-a-kind museum are well underway.  Many 
improvements and added facilities have been added since I was there in April, 
including a nice bar and restaurant in the original Hut Four.  Again I will 
keep the net up-to-date until the Web server is generally available.  

I strongly urge everyone who has the opportunity to visit BP to do so.  At 
this point they are open every other weekend, but will, at some point in the 
future, improve on that. 

If you have any questions, e-mail me, or for 'open weekend status' call BP 
directly at: (011 44) 1 908 640404.

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues at Bletchley Park; Roger, Peter, Tony, 
Harry, Margaret, etc, for their hospitality and kindness.


	-paul (pjb@23kgroup.com)