#bletchleypark — Public Fediverse posts

The Buckinghamshire attraction that hid one of Britain’s biggest wartime secrets

Did you know that Buckinghamshire is home to a “fascinating” attraction that shaped British history? Bletchley Park was…
#EuropeSays #Britain #Europe #EU #Bletchley #BletchleyPark
https://www.europesays.com/britain/118028/

https://www.europesays.com/britain/118028/ The Buckinghamshire attraction that hid one of Britain’s biggest wartime secrets #Bletchley #BletchleyPark #Britain

Had a good day with my eldest. We went to the National Museum Of Computers at legendary Bletchley Park. I've been before, but he hadn't.

Despite his anxiety, he lasted a couple of hours which was better than I expected.

Photos attached.

#TNMOC #bletchleyPark #retroComputing #Psion #Acorn

I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.

If anyone is bored enough to be curious!

31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.

2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.

19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.

Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.

9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.

BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.

It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.

MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.

(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism

Episódio 169 – Criptografia – Parte A

https://retropolis.com.br/2025/11/05/episodio-169-parte-a/

#Podcast #alfabeto #AnliseDeFrequncia #rabes #BlackChambers #BletchleyPark #bomba #CifraDeCesar #CifraDeVigenre #ctala #CdigoFonte #Colossus #criptoanlise #Criptografia #DiscoDeCifras #Egito #EscritaCuneiforme #Grcia #Herdoto #hierglifos #LinearB #macartismo #MquinaEnigma #MquinaLorenz #Mesopotmia #NSA #PedraDeRosetta #PGP #podcast #Retrocomputao #retrogaming #Retrpolis #RodaCifradora #roma #RO

Episódio 169 – Criptografia – Parte A

https://retropolis.com.br/2025/11/05/episodio-169-parte-a/

#Podcast #alfabeto #AnliseDeFrequncia #rabes #BlackChambers #BletchleyPark #bomba #CifraDeCesar #CifraDeVigenre #ctala #CdigoFonte #Colossus #criptoanlise #Criptografia #DiscoDeCifras #Egito #EscritaCuneiforme #Grcia #Herdoto #hierglifos #LinearB #macartismo #MquinaEnigma #MquinaLorenz #Mesopotmia #NSA #PedraDeRosetta #PGP #podcast #Retrocomputao #retrogaming #Retrpolis #RodaCifradora #roma #RO

Episódio 169 – Criptografia – Parte A

https://retropolis.com.br/2025/11/05/episodio-169-parte-a/

#Podcast #alfabeto #AnliseDeFrequncia #rabes #BlackChambers #BletchleyPark #bomba #CifraDeCesar #CifraDeVigenre #ctala #CdigoFonte #Colossus #criptoanlise #Criptografia #DiscoDeCifras #Egito #EscritaCuneiforme #Grcia #Herdoto #hierglifos #LinearB #macartismo #MquinaEnigma #MquinaLorenz #Mesopotmia #NSA #PedraDeRosetta #PGP #podcast #Retrocomputao #retrogaming #Retrpolis #RodaCifradora #roma #RO

Episódio 169 – Criptografia – Parte A

https://retropolis.com.br/2025/11/05/episodio-169-parte-a/

#Podcast #alfabeto #AnliseDeFrequncia #rabes #BlackChambers #BletchleyPark #bomba #CifraDeCesar #CifraDeVigenre #ctala #CdigoFonte #Colossus #criptoanlise #Criptografia #DiscoDeCifras #Egito #EscritaCuneiforme #Grcia #Herdoto #hierglifos #LinearB #macartismo #MquinaEnigma #MquinaLorenz #Mesopotmia #NSA #PedraDeRosetta #PGP #podcast #Retrocomputao #retrogaming #Retrpolis #RodaCifradora #roma #RO

Fantastic day at Bletchley Park and The National Museum of Computing.

My annual pilgrimage...

#BletchleyPark
#TNMOC

I broke more than fixed this week! I'd placed a few items in the machine out of line so last few bits didn't fit in. Had to check scan and correct placing. All fixed now! The question to answer today - "What happens if you run out of paper?"
#bletchleypark #tnmoc

Now we finally get to see how all the messing about in Virtual SG-41 with cogs & cams starts to encipher our letter. A lot of work done in past couple of weeks to get here, this is a fiendishly clever device!
#bletchleypark #tnmoc #threejs

Weekly output: Musk digitally deleting USAID, Arm vs. Qualcomm, U.K. vs. Apple, 8K TV, Bletchley Park

One of this week’s published stories began with reporting weeks ago; another began with notes and photos taken months ago.

2/3/2025: Musk’s Minions Deleting Digital Presence of US International Development Agency, PCMag

I could not just write about the weird digital erasure Elon Musk and his goons have been inflicting on the online presence of the U.S. Agency for International Development without reminding readers of three important bits of context: USAID does good and useful work (as vouched for in that quote from Georgetown University government-department chair Anthony Arend, four of whose classes I took as an undergrad 35-plus years ago); USAID constituted all of .4% of the federal budget in fiscal year 2024; Elon Musk’s tweets show no sign of him having any interest in the agency until January.

2/6/2025: Arm Drops Effort to Cancel Qualcomm’s Chip-Licensing Deal, PCMag

If you were considering buying a Windows laptop with one of Qualcomm’s power-efficient Snapdragon X processors, this should rank as very good news.

2/7/2025: Report: UK Orders Apple to Disable E2E Encryption on iCloud Backups Worldwide, PCMag

Writing up the Washington Post’s scoop about this dangerous demand by the U.K.’s Home Office gave me a crash course in looking up and citing legislation on Parliament’s Web site–without which I would have been writing about the Investigatory Powers Act without pointing people to the text of that 2016 statute and its 2024 amendments.

2/8/2025: In 2025, the Picture for 8K TVs (Still) Isn’t Looking Too Bright or Sharp, PCMag

I originally had delusions of writing this piece from CES with a Las Vegas dateline, but the weeks since then allowed me to get some additional numbers from the Consumer Technology Association and quiz another analyst as well as the head of the 8K Association.

2/9/2025: To See Codebreaking At Its Most Metal, Visit Bletchley Park, PCMag

Some of you may remember my writing a piece about Bletchley Park for the long-gone information-security publication The Parallax in 2018. I decided to revisit this museum of WWII codebreaking when my trip to London in October for Uber’s Go-Get Zero event (on Uber’s dime) left me with an afternoon free, and I’m glad I did because I was able to check out one exhibit that I’d had to skip earlier and see a few exhibits they’d added since then.

#8K #8KTV #AgencyForInternationalDevelopment #ArmHoldings #BletchleyPark #codebreaking #cryptography #EnigmaMachine #iCloudEncryption #InvestigatoryPowersAct #MuskCoup #Qualcomm #SnapdragonX #SnoopersCharter #UKHomeOffice #USAID

Wow, this has taken a lot of staring at 3D scans to understand, but we're ready to look at the full mechanism on the SG-41 to get the key pressed lined up with the paper! I hope you're enjoying following along with me on this project. #tnmoc #bletchleypark #cryptomuseum

Visiting Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) today. My annual "pilgrimage"...

#BletchleyPark
#tnmoc