I was at Bletchley Park last weekend for Over The Air, a mobile development conference/hack day. It's a truly extraordinary place - if you haven't been yet, you have a real treat in store.
They've already done a fantastic job bringing the place to life, and the working reconstructions of both Colossus (the first electronic programmable computer) and Alan Turing's Bombe (the mechanical device that cracked Enigma) are both completely spellbinding. They also do a really good tour.
I wonder whether any of this money will trickle down to the National Museum of Computing (http://tnmoc.org/) at Bletchley Park? That museum is the main thing that gets me returning to Bletchley on a regular basis, but they seem to be constantly struggling for cash in their ongoing battle to keep half a century's worth of computers in working order. On a selfish level, I'm just as interested in preserving that aspect of Bletchley's (and Turing's) heritage.
I only recently learned of Turings seminal work on mathematical biology; he demonstrated that much of the complexity found in nature is the result of simple algorithms. His concepts we learn about today in fields such as fractals and Chaos theory.
It's possible that Alan Turing might have one become one the all time great scientist had he survived to live out his career.
Bletchley Park is very high on my to do list next time I'm in the UK - along with IWM Duxford [1].
Bletchley Park fully recognizes the significance of the initial work done in Poland (see, for example, their annual Polish festival: http://www.bletchleypark.co.uk/calendar/event_detail.rhtm?re... and publications like this: http://www.bletchleypark.co.uk/content/hist/history/polish.r... and the Polish memorial on site).
Time to get that bank card out of my wallet.
[1] http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/contact/donation/sup...
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-thanks-t...
Great to see that Bletchley Park will live on, it's one of very few historical sites that have meaning to those that are interested in our digital beginnings.
Here's the email I sent to Downing St. summarizing the situation on September 11, 2009:
Kirsty,
As you can imagine I have an Inbox filled with
media requests and congratulatory notes from
around the world. A common theme in these
mails is a desire to see a memorial of some
kind to Alan Turing.
Three suggestions (in order of popularity):
1. Find some way to fund Bletchley Park and the
National Museum of Computing.
2. Use the Fourth Plinth for a Turing statue
3. Name the marathon at the 2012 Olympics after
Turing (he was a very good marathon runner and
it's his centenary in 2012).
All of these are good suggestions. If the government
did #1 you would have my full backing.
John.
It is an empty statue base in Trafalgar Square, London. It is presently used for temporary displays of artworks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_plinth,_Trafalgar_Square
Good stuff.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12575029
Why use tax payers money to buy prints of Turings papers when the original papers weren't lost and the content of the prints was known? Makes no sense to me. Just so you can stick some pieces of paper in a glass case somewhere?
It appears from all reports I've seen that there is literally nothing of significance that would be lost with the export of these papers. None of the Press, which all seems to be based on the writing of Gareth Halfacre, detailed what was special about the papers:
"The set includes articles which have been annotated by Newman, along with Max Newman's name inscribed in pencil in Turing's hand. Accompanying the set of offprints is the Newman household visitors’ book with several signatures of Turing, that of Turing’s mother and, of special significance to Bletchley Park, signatures of other wartime codebreaking giants." [from http://www.nhmf.org.uk/LatestNews/Pages/EleventhHourRescueof...]
It seems the public were sold a lie. People thought the papers were Turings original notes and such when in fact he just wrote his friends name on the top.
The NHMF should now just take hi-res scans of the documents and sell them for whatever they can get. Nothing of significance will be lost you can look up the papers on Google Scholar.
Edit: as an associated example, you can get http://plms.oxfordjournals.org/content/s2-42/1/230.extract for free but it costs you $22k for the first edition print (http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=sea...). IMO the free online version is more valuable.
It's a bit depressing that programming and that kind of thinking is neglected in the curriculum.