PGP CEO Blog

Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting Bletchley Park to announce a new initiative that PGP Corporation is co-sponsoring with IBM to support the fine work being done at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) in the United Kingdom. TNMOC is housed at the same Bletchley Park facility that hosted the largest code breaking operation of World War II. It is dedicated to preserving the computing machines and history that have been critical in the development of Europe’s IT industry and the study of computer science worldwide. TNMOC already contains the largest collection of functioning historic computing devices in Europe.

PGP Corporation is undertaking this effort for three reasons. The first is that without a material increase in financial support, the Bletchley Park facility will likely be closed in the next few years and the machines and their stories lost to time. TNMOC receives no public support and is dependent upon private donations to fund both operations and capital improvements. To kick-start this initiative PGP Corporation and IBM yesterday announced a joint contribution of $100,000 (£57,000). I would urge you to join us and help support the very important work being done by the staff and volunteers at Bletchley Park.

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Second, in my visits to Bletchley Park I have found that because of the critical work performed there during the war years, many Britons feel an intensely personal connection to the place. This is particularly true of Britons (and others who know the history of what Alan Turing did for computer science) with any connection to computing or its past. For an industry that prides itself on driving to obsolescence its very best accomplishments as fast as possible, it’s refreshing to see an appreciation for the accomplishments of those that preceded us.

For those of you not familiar with the story of Bletchley Park, it was the facility that housed “Station X” and the secret project to intercept and decode German military communications. Under the project code named “Ultra”, the 9,000 technicians working at Bletchley Park are widely credited with shortening the European war by at least two years, if not responsible for the victory itself.

The German encoding system known as Enigma was considered the most advanced encryption machine of its time. What the German high command didn’t know was that a little known Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski had cracked the Engima code in 1932.

Building on Rejewski’s work and extending it with their own innovations, the Bletchley Park team was able to provide Allied commanders with unprecedented visibility into the German’s command and control system. Their work is considered directly responsible for the Allied navy’s ability to banish the German U-Boat fleet from the Northern Atlantic.

While being able to read Enigma coded messages was critical from an operational perspective, the other major accomplishment of the Bletchley Park team was cracking the Tunny cipher that was used by the German high command for strategic communications. To assist in the decoding of Tunny encoded traffic, the Bletchley Park team designed and built what can only be called the world’s first supercomputer, Colossus. While not as well known as the ability to decode Enigma encoded messages, most historians believe that the clear-text messages that emerged from Colossus had at least as much to do with the Allies’ string of successful operations in the European theater.

Unfortunately, after the war nearly all of the devices built at Bletchley Park and their documentation were destroyed. Fortunately for us, a few of the dedicated Bletchley Park scientists understand the importance of preserving history for subsequent generations. So it was in November of 2007 that a team led by Tony Sale completed a fully functioning replica of a Colossus Mark II computer. The highlight of my day yesterday was watching Tony fire up his replica Colossus.

The final reason that PGP Corporation is leading the drive to preserve the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is a deeply held belief that if we don’t honor teams like the one that worked at Station X, we will never fulfill their vision of utilizing technology and communications to enable mankind to realize the best intentions of human endeavor. In the same way that Bletchley Park built on the work of Marian Rejewsky, cryptographers have been building on the work of Station X for sixty years. We owe it to that team and the teams that will succeed us to preserve their accomplishments, their machines, their techniques, and their vision.

- Phil