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.html

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:


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