Party Vibe

@tryptameanie 982857 wrote:

Thought the only computers around when Angel was at school were at Bletchley park…..

she is from the same generation as me; things were slightly more advanced by then.

There is a distant connection though as just after WW II the PTT telecom of the Nordic countries (DK/SE, NO etc) still used Enigma crypto left behind by the Germans and knew well GCHQ had kept on two of the Collossus machines to decrypt their comms as they feared these countries were Soviet aligned.

The Danish govt offered the uni profs some millions of crowns to build better crypto machines but they told them “sometimes it is better to hide in plain sight, but we’ll take the cash anyway and build computers for schools and universities”. Which is how Regnecentralen was funded 🙂

a lot of the bletchley park stuff was still restricted when I was at school – in 1987 when doing work experience at British Telecom one engineer said to me “don’t believe those Yanks who say they invented computers, we British built the first ones but were still not supposed to talk about it..” to be fair my high school computer lab was quite advanced; we had an entire 10 megabytes hard drive networked across 16 computers + a dual CPU server [I found various kernel backdoors in the network and pwned it by 1986; although there wasn’t much interesting on the hard drive as the teachers had (probably wisely) decided against using it for exam results knowing what might one day happen :laugh_at:

quite a lot of stuff was only declassified last year (like the BBC radio monitoring installations that fed raw wireless intercepts to GCHQ down the BT lines)