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A great talk on World War II Codebreaking

By Noah | March 22, 2009

Bletchley Park was the estate where Alan Turing and an amazing team of codebreakers cracked several key World War II German ciphers, and where they built the world’s first programmable electronic digital computers.  Bletchley is falling into disrepair, and there are ongoing efforts to raise funds to save it.

While rummaging around following links about this effort, I stumbled onto a video of a terrific talk by Captain Jerry Roberts.  Captain Roberts, one of the last surviving codebreakers from Bletchley, is a wonderful character and at age 88 still a very engaging speaker.  In this talk at UCL, he tells for the first time the story of his work at Bletchley. By quite an amazing coincidence, Captain Roberts is introduced in the video by my good friend Susanne Kord, who chairs the German Department at UCL.

Topics: History of computing | No Comments »

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