Day 14 – Codes and Confusion

“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.” –Alan Turing

National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park – https://www.tnmoc.org/

Our day at Bletchley Park proved to be quite interesting.  Having seen the movie The Imitation Game, I had a brief idea about what we were going to see.  We got to tour the National Museum of Computing and had a wonderful tour of technology through the ages.  The machines used by Alan Turing and the other code breakers was amazing.  They were full scale working replicas of the machines they actually used during World War II.  It was great to see them but what was really exciting was that several of the machines were turned on, so we got to see them in action. 

It was also really neat to see more recent, but still quite old technology.  We saw a 4-megabyte hard drive that was over 2 feet tall.  The tour guide also allowed us to type our names into an old computer that would print it out in code.  While I obviously cannot read it, I thought that was really exciting!

Sadly, most of what we learned at this museum went completely over my head.  I didn’t understand 90% of what we were told yet I was completely captivated by the information and really loved the tour!  I am amazed that many people’s minds work that way and that information like this comes easy to them.  It might have been confusing, but it was a wonderful tour and in my opinion was one of the top tours we took!