Virtual Colossus

#VirtualEnigma is coming to a browser near you to celebrate Alan Turing's Birthday! That means you've only got to wait until 23rd June 2021. It is fully browser based so no install required & should run on most modern systems. From WW2 to WWW @tnmoc @bletchleypark @threejs_org

10 Years of Virtual Colossus: 2019 In this year, I created a sim of E.R.N.I.E to celebrate the new 5th version. A hardware random number generator built in 1956 to find winners for the UK Premium Bonds. Designed by Harry Fensom who worked at the GPO Research Station, Dollis Hill

10 Years of Virtual Colossus: 2018 In 2018, I started looking at a BP cipher breaking machine from the American Signal Security Agency. This was Dragon, a relay machine built to drag a crib through a partially decrypted message from Colossus. A fascinating machine to learn about

ECRs: Present your research at @BletchleyPark! Apply for the Computable 90 Bursary to join @TNMOC & @LondonMathSoc this Sept. ✅ Present your work ✅ Network with icons ✅ Registration only £50 📅 Deadline: 5 April 2026 🔗: tnmoc.org/computable90-c… #ECR #AlanTuring #Mathematics

10 Years of Virtual Colossus: 2017 Having completed my Colossus sim, I became interested in how the machine that it was built to crack worked: the Lorenz SZ-42. There wasn't a working machine I knew of to see working and no videos online, so I began researching to build my own.

Can you believe that the Virtual Colossus project is now 10 years old! Today, I'm starting the countdown to the release of my latest simulation the incredible Schlüsselgerät 41. Each day, I'll show what I was working on from 2016 until we catch up to today! @tnmoc @bletchleypark

@Wolf_oe7ftj That would be cool, but this is a cheap custom os watch, it doesn't allow you to load or run your own apps. When I can afford decent watch, maybe I'll write one!

@VirtualColossus And if you could encode and decode also ..... 😎

I've found out how to hack my watch face to be more on brand. What do you think?

Scots WW2 codebreaker, 102, receives sweet letter of thanks from Danish teenager dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-…

@bletchleypark More of these Focus On series @bletchleypark podcast! I really enjoyed hearing more detail about code breaker Emily Anderson's life in and out of BP, what an amazing lady. Looking forward to the next one.

🎙️ New Bletchley Park Podcast - E188 - Focus On: Emily Anderson This is the first of the new sub-series Focus On: and looks at Emily Anderson. Tom interviews Jackie Uí Chionna about Britain’s greatest female codebreaker. Even amongst the distinguished ranks of WW2 codebreakers, Emily Anderson stood out. Recruited into military intelligence during WWI, her stellar career in diplomatic codebreaking lasted into the 1950s. Her greatest achievement came with the breaking of high-level Italian ciphers during the East African Campaign of 1940-41. It was called 'the perfect example of the cryptographers' war' and earned her the OBE in 1943. Anderson was also a renowned musicologist - her translations of the letters of Mozart and Beethoven are still considered authoritative. Yet until recent years, her life and intelligence work remained under the radar. This episode helps to set the record straight, and kick off a new occasional series focusing on key personalities in codebreaking and intelligence. Bletchley Park's Research Officer Dr Thomas Cheetham is joined by Jackie Uí Chionna from the University of Galway to discuss the subject of her 2023 biography Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker. Our thanks go to Sarah Langston for voicing our historical documents. Image: Dr. Dagmar von Bushe-Weise Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Listen here: audioboom.com/posts/8867016-… #BletchleyPark

Well, this was a fun one to do!

23 Feb 1918: Arthur Scherbius, maker of the Enigma machine, files his first patent for a cipher machine using rotor scramblers.

Nearing the go-live date for Virtual Schlüsselgerät 41 .. or at least until I find there's yet another part that I didn't quite understand on this complex 1940s cipher machine. Here's the result & now back to final testing. Check out my new transparent case mode! (I♥️@threejs!)

Continuing my fun with the Enigma machine: I wrote two emulators for a Commodore 64, one in BASIC and the other in Assembly (Turbo Macro Pro, coded on a C64). The BASIC version does about 3 characters per second. The assembly version can encrypt/decrypt roughly 1500 characters per second.

If you are planning to visit us this week, please be aware that the entry in to Sherwood Drive from Buckingham Road (B4034) is due to be closed for roadworks from 17 to 20 February. Please follow the diversion to the other end of Sherwood Drive (where you bypass the road closure sign) to reach the entrance of Bletchley Park. Details of roadworks in the local area can be found at one.network.

During World War II, Britain removed millions of iron railings from streets and homes as part of a national scrap-metal drive. Much of this metal was melted down and reused for war production, including weapons, vehicles and medical equipment like stretchers. Those stretchers were mass-produced from this recycled steel for emergency services during The Blitz. After the war, many became surplus, and instead of scrapping them again, some were simply repurposed as they were back into railings and creating what we now call stretcher railings.

@Oscar_CEDS Oh my, that looks amazing!! I really really want one. 😍

We've made another version of the Enigma touch!

@bletchleypark BP Post fix: This Valentine's Day card was sent to Bombe Operator Jessie Morgan (Jones) from an admirer in Dundee in 1943. Jessie was billeted at Walton Hall, just outside Bletchley. The message inside the card reads “You’ve collared this heart of mine, my own sweet Valentine!”

Vintage tech still has a pulse. 💓 Our PDP-11/73 is looking sharp with a working VT240 graphics terminal on display. Thanks to our volunteers for all their restoration love & continued conservation. Happy Valentine's Day! #TNMoC #RetroComputing #PDP