Word: bletchley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Turing and other Enigma-code crackers at Bletchley Park build Colossus...
...while this electronic brain, as headline writers called it, took the spotlight, ENIAC had a lot of unsung rivals, many of them shrouded in wartime secrecy. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built a succession of vacuum-tube machines called Colossus that made mincemeat of Hitler's Enigma codes. At Harvard, large, clattering electromechanical computers in IBM's Mark series also did wartime calculations. Even the Germans made a stab at computing with Konrad Zuse's Z electromechanical computers, the last of which was the first general-purpose computer controlled by a program...
Turing, on the basis of his published work, was recruited to serve in the Government Code and Cypher School, located in a Victorian mansion called Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. The task of all those so assembled--mathematicians, chess champions, Egyptologists, whoever might have something to contribute about the possible permutations of formal systems--was to break the Enigma codes used by the Nazis in communications between headquarters and troops. Because of secrecy restrictions, Turing's role in this enterprise was not acknowledged until long after his death. And like the invention of the computer, the work done by the Bletchley...
...intended. But the newly created mathematics division of the British National Physical Laboratory offered him the opportunity to create an actual Turing machine, the ACE or Automatic Computing Engine, and Turing accepted. What he discovered, unfortunately, was that the emergency spirit that had short-circuited so many problems at Bletchley Park during the war had dissipated. Bureaucracy, red tape and interminable delays once again were the order of the day. Finding most of his suggestions dismissed, ignored or overruled, Turing eventually left the NPL for another stay at Cambridge and then accepted an offer from the University of Manchester where...
Harris takes for his hero a neurasthenic mathematician named Tom Jericho, frail, distracted, fluky even by the measure of other code breakers at Bletchley, a town west of Cambridge where the secret intelligence unit has its warren. As the drama starts, Jericho has been furloughed from Bletchley because of instability, but is brought back again because his eerily acute mind is needed even if it is haunted and unraveling. Subplots involve a forlorn love interest and the burrowings of a suspected mole, but the real story, and a good one, is whether Jericho can track Enigma through the deep space...