The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block
The National Museum of Computing has unveiled renovations to keep out the rain and smartening up H block as celebrations take place to mark the 80th anniversary of the Colossus II computer.
The National Museum of Computing occupies Block H at Bletchley Park in the UK, and the building was first made ready for occupation on September 17, 1944. An annex to the now-demolished Block F, Block H was designed to accommodate six Colossus II computers and is notable for being one of the first constructed specifically to house electric computers.
The Colossus was constructed specifically to help decipher the Lorenz-encrypted (Tunny) messages sent between Hitler and his generals during World War II. The museum notes that the "information gleaned from the decrypted messages is widely acknowledged to have shortened the war by many months, saving tens of thousands of lives."
The years have not been kind to the building, and The Register was invited to attend a celebration marking more than half a million pounds of renovation to the structure, which included fixing the roof to remove the need to scramble for buckets every time it rained.
