Hi Tom: I have Sue Black's permission to forward this to you for SIGCIS. Cheers Brian Begin forwarded message:
From: Sue Black <s.black@cs.ucl.ac.uk> Date: 9 March 2012 01:32:41 GMT Subject: Bletchley Park update and new Colossus video
Dear all,
Google have made a really lovely, poignant film about Tommy Flowers and Colossus, I urge you all to watch it. It features several of the people that worked with him at the time and really evokes for me the same feelings that I get when I go to Bletchley Park. The people working there did such amazing things, shortening the war by 2 years and on the whole got no credit at all.
Film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knXWMjIA59c
Related blogpost: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/remembering-colossus-worlds-first.htm...
While I'm on the subject of Bletchley....The Turing exhibition was officially opened this week by James May of Top Gear fame. It is a lovely and interesting exhibition including Turing's school reports, Turing's teddy bear and a copy of a letter from out very own Professor Brian Randell to Turing's mother. If you get the opportunity please go to see it, and take your staff, and students, friends, neighbours etc. ;))
Prof John Clark at York kindly invited me and the former and current CEOs of Bletchley Park (Iain Standen and Simon Greenish) to University of York last night to give a public lecture entitled: Did Twitter save Bletchley Park? About 200 people turned out on a windy night, they were a lovely audience :)) When we asked them at the end of our talk to decide whether Twitter did save Bletchley Park they said YES! :)) Slides from our talk are here:
http://www.slideshare.net/blackse/did-twitter-save-bletchley-park
I can't remember if I told you all but Google gave Bletchley Park £500k at the end of last year, and I'm hoping that the relationship between them will carry on developing. I'm going to go to the US as part of a fundraising tour with Sir John Scarlett, new Bletchley Park Trust Chair, later this year which should be fun and will hopefully bring in new streams of revenue :))
I think that's all for now, please do watch the film, it is very evocative.
Take care all
Sue
-- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell