The Colossus of codes - recent books review from THE GUARDIAN
Martin Postranecky <mp-/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.cryptography.bletchley-park |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
The Guardian Saturday July 29, 2006 The Colossus of codes --------------------- Georgina Ferry on four new books that tackle the story of Bletchley Park's other decryption machine : Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret by Paul Gannon 562pp, Atlantic, £25 Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers edited by Jack Copeland 462pp, Oxford, £18.99 The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt 319pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99 The Binary Revolution: The History and Development of the Computer by Neil Barrett 304pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99 Once one of the best-kept secrets in British history, Bletchley Park has achieved near-celebrity status over the past three decades. The wartime headquarters of the Government Code & Cipher School has starred in a novel, a feature film, at least one TV series and any number of non-fiction accounts. Most involve the word Enigma and include a starring role for the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing. And indeed the story of how Turing and his fellow codebreakers deciphered the Enigma Morse code traffic that signalled U-boat movements in the Atlantic is undoubtedly one of the most inspiring in the history of the second world war. The name Colossus also circulates among those with an interest in wartime history and codebreaking, but what was it? Neil Barrett, in his short and ill-researched book The Binary Revolution, is only the latest to make the entirely erroneous claim that Colossus was a machine used to crack Enigma codes and to imply that Turing was its progenitor. Fortunately, with the more or less simultaneous appearance of Jack Copeland's and Paul Gannon's comprehensive treatments, there is no longer any excuse for such casual disregard for the facts..../snip/ ....Having whetted the appetite for conspiracy with his title, Leavitt can find no evidence that Turing was murdered as a security risk, accepting the well-rehearsed account of his suicide in 1954 by cyanide-impregnated apple. Read Leavitt for a picture of the fragility of human genius; read Gannon and Copeland to feel the collective power of human minds harnessed to the cause of defending our freedom. * Georgina Ferry is the author of "A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer" ( HarperPerennial ) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1831304,00.html