simont | (no subject)

‘Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion,’ says the guard who had spoken on the telephone. ‘You can't miss it.’
Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is, indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute, trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched urban row-houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.
– Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

As part of beckyc's birthday celebrations, I was part of a bunch of about ten people who went to the Bletchley Park museum yesterday. I'd never been there before, although I had of course read Enigma and Cryptonomicon so it was a familiar setting in my imagination if not in reality.

One of the major things I noticed on getting there was that the above quotation is all absolutely true. The crowning touch, I feel, is the gable and cupola which interpenetrate in a manner which suggests they were accidentally overlaid in a ray-tracing program by somebody who wasn't paying quite enough attention to their coordinates. It's a monstrosity, and that's coming from somebody who doesn't usually have enough interest in architecture to express any strong opinions about it at all.

As for the rest of the park, well, it was good, but somehow more museumy than I'd have hoped. As a museum it's definitely good – many of the display cases and information boards tell you genuinely interesting stuff – but somehow I felt that you could have set up a conventional glass-cases-and-posters museum about Bletchley Park anywhere you liked, and if you were going to do something on the site itself then you surely ought to make use of that in a more creative fashion, such as by trying to reconstruct the interiors of the huts in a way that actually gave an impression of what it might have been like to be involved in the codebreaking efforts. Hut 4, for example, should have been cramped, crowded, and full of filing cabinets and exasperated naval intelligence officers dashing back and forth with small slips of paper, or failing that at least given the impression that said officers had just popped out for an important meeting and would be very busy again as soon as they came back. Instead, it was a largely empty shell containing a lecture room.

I got into an argument with the tour guide at one point, over a technical point about the codebreaking procedure. I did some quick calculations using my watch's calculator mode to support my claims, but he said some of my assumptions were faulty. I went away and thought about that; it occurred to me that if I had a computer handy instead of a piffling little calculator then I ought to be able to knock together a real demonstration of my point pretty quickly. Then it occurred to me that the hands-on exhibits in the history-of-computing museum included a BBC micro, so I wandered over there and quickly typed in a twenty-line program which tested my assertion; the tour guide came back half an hour later while we were eating lunch and I was able to cite the results of that program as part of my argument :-) He eventually conceded my point after discovering that he'd misunderstood it. (Phew.)

It hadn't occurred to me, but clearly should have with hindsight, that Bletchley Park's visitors would be likely to contain a high proportion of geeks. While I was hacking on the Beeb, a random old guy came over to watch what I was doing, and then said in a slightly puzzled voice ‘You don't look old enough to know how to program a BBC’. This struck me as slightly odd, since I didn't even encounter a BBC until about seven years after starting to learn to program, by which time it wasn't about to present me with any conceptual difficulties; but I suppose if (as he did) you'd programmed the things yourself when you were forty, you might be slightly surprised that a teenager would have been doing the same things.

Still, a good day out all round. A tiring one, though, so it's a good job I have today to recover from it before going back to work!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Grin. I've got you down as too young for Beebs too. What did you start on?

My family got a Spectrum when they first came out (I was five), and I read the manual and started on that. I encountered Beebs at my secondary school, by which time my family had upgraded to an Amiga and my dad also had some variously PC-like machines he'd borrowed from his job at Digital.

My mum insists that we had a ZX81 the year before the Spectrum, but I have no memory of that at all; my earliest memories of coding are on the Spectrum.

Cor. No wonder you're so good!

I also had a much similar series of computer exposures as Simon did — I think many of us our age learned to program on at least one 8-bit computer. I think I'd actually find it easier to produce BBC Micro BASIC nowadays than I would ZX Spectrum BASIC, but that's because I've spent some time in between using the more recent versions of BBC BASIC.

I'm younger than

simont and I grew up on Beebs too :-). I started on a Commadore Pet, but don't remember doing much programming before a BBC. I suspect that at age twenty-mumblecoughlots, I'm one of the oldest people to have grown up with computers

There is a family story that, when I was a toddler, I put my mum off computers for over ten years by spotting that she had mistyped something from a beeb-programming book and pointing and saying "That's a syntax error, Mummy" (which it was).

Bletchley Park is a victim of having been used for a top-secret project that was dismantled when the war was over then hushed up for half a decade.

This is basically why it's been passed over as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site:

From an initial understanding of the historical potential, Bletchley Park was designated as a Conservation Area in February 1992. The main house and the stable yard buildings are listed at grade II, but in 1993 the wartime structures due to limited knowledge were not selected for listing and in 1999 the site was not included by DCMS on the shortlist for UNESCO UK world heritage sites. All these decisions reflected uncertainty concerning the degree to which the landscape and surviving buildings at Bletchley Park provided a tangible reflection of its role and contribution to the outcome of the Second World War and the birth of the Information Age.

So yes, the museum could to a large extent be anywhere, but it's hard to argue with the contention that Bletchley Park is the most appropriate place. (-8

Oooh. I'm reading Quicksilver at the moment and am enjoying it lots. I hadn't got very far, though, before I realised I was going to have to read it again and have a better idea of how everything fits together... Nearly finished it now, so I need to decide if I want to do that before or after I read the next two books!

I was impressed the tour guide came back over lunch to resolve the point; it's an attribute which I hold in much respect.

*chortling* Once again Simon takes over the world entirely by accident!