ABSTRACT
BLETCHLEY PARK and WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARDS: STORIES from
the PREHISTORY and EARLY HISTORY of BRITISH COMPUTING
Mr. Brian Oakley
(formerly a scientific manager/administrator in several
historically interesting environments connected with
the title of the seminar)
"Bletchley Park" is now a well-known phrase in Britain, thanks to some recent
successes in the industries of novel publishing, film making and television
programme production. While these have been fun, they have mostly ignored
or treated rather casually the developments in machine-aided cryptographic
work from that source that have led to modern computing.
The seminar will consider first the wartime developments associated with
Bletchley Park, and then the subsequent early history of British computing
and the industry that arose from it. Some of the material covered in the
seminar comes from the first-hand contact of the speaker with people,
projects and objects that were present at the time - a recommendation that
is obviously becoming rarer every year and which is now already quite rare.
Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk