Cool Pacific

On the train at Manchester the accents wash over me. 

“Youe go’ u’ early todey innit?” 

What to do with three hours in London? Roll a dice on Monopoly board. Euston Road to Kensington.

And here I am.

This is a 1543 edition print of a book by Vetruvius, a Roman architect. He emphasised Mathematical symmetry and perspective in architectural beauty. It less than 100 years from the time of Da’Vinci – and he would have read an earlier print of this book, when producing his work the Vetruvian Man.

This is a Sextant and book of Log tables they used on ships for navigation.

This is a fragment of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine (The Log Tabulator). He would have used it for obtaining further funding. It indicates that his complete machine was never built.

This is a slightly bigger but still incomplete version (of the Log Tabulator) done by this son after his death using parts that he found. You can see a book of log tables next to it.

This is a complete reconstruction of the Difference Engine (log tabulator) built in 2002 by Computer-Engineer historians.

This is a part of the Analytical Engine (enables numbers to knit numbers) that Charles Babbage completed. Plans show that if completed, the final result would have been much bigger.

This is a calculator/computer that Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) built to predict tides. Some have called it the first Victorian Computer.

Tesco breakfast porridge pots are surprisingly good. Speaking of supermarkets, there is a progressive evolution here. I recall in the 1990s, when a lot of the small chicken shops closed down because Coles and Woolworths started offering hot roast chicken. 

When I came to London in 2000 it was novel that the supermarkets offered takeaway sandwiches of the chicken and egg variety,. Still more expensive than doing it at home but remarkably convenient.

What we’ve seen in supermarkets at home has been the expansion of the take-home instant dinner meal. Here at Tesco’s they have expanded that to the next level.

We see two tears of dinner meal package deals. On the lower tier we see the equivalent of a pasta and a desert and a take-home soft drink.

On the higher-tier we see take-home meals for two that have a roast mains to microwave, a side of vegetables, a desert, and an alcoholic beverage.

The population of greater Manchester is 3 million. In 1992 Sydney was competing with Manchester for the Olympics. At the time, Manchester was considered to have high unemployment and rainfall. (I didn’t see much evidence of either thankfully.)

Manchester today is famous for football, music (Oasis, The Verve, Chemical Brothers, Simply Red) and the world’s longest running soap, Coronation Street. 

The Manchester science industry Museum. The building was built 200 years ago to store cotton brought in my the first inter-city train from Liverpool.

The Museum was under construction and still running due to changing the roof, and reconfiguring the displays, away from the aeroplane museum and back to an 1850s train station replica.

Manchester grew from a collection of towns that weaved cotton in 1800 to an Industrial City in 1895 (they claim the first City that grew out of the Industrial Revolution.) The Museum had a collection of Cotton spinning and weaving machines.  

The presenter says that Manchester’s industrial wealth needs to acknowledge the slave labour of African people receiving no pay in the Southern US. 

We see a Slumming machine then a Roving machine to make cotton thread stronger. 
We could see the Roving machine rotating parts could injure a hand and the belts could scalp a person. 

We saw a spinning machine – one woman worked two at a time, on opposite sides. 

Workers gathered in the 1850s around coffee stalls before 6am, waiting for the shift to start.  A shuttle that flew off a machine could take out a tooth or smash a window. 

They showed looms doing patterns.

There was overcrowding, filth and grime. They had a lack of clean water. Engineers and campaigners acted to bring protests and projects to bring clean water to the city. 

In Manchester the workers (trade unions ) fought for weekends, health and safety and education for children.

A treat – the first pattern-sewing machine – a 1700s-Era Jacquard Loom – one that Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage would have known and imitated.

I’m here to see the Manchester Baby. (“Munchusta Bebi”). The first “modern” stored-program Computer. I have no philosophical qualms about calling this a computer. (This differs from the ENIAC in that the ENIAC had no memory – and had to be wired up for each program.)

Its storage was on Cathode Ray tubes. (This technology was quickly superseded.)

It was built by students from Manchester University – who went on to start the UK’s first Computer Science department.

The cotton mill machines (hundreds of thousands in Manchester) drove a demand for Engineers. Engineers who had a desire to improve and automate. Manchester became a place of machined and precise parts. They build cutting machines for building precise gears – and machines of increased accuracy (Joseph Whitworth 1860 – cutting down to a millionth of an inch.)

In 1862, the process was perfected in Manchester for a rolling machine to produce wire continuously.

There were stories about women working in airplane manufacture factories during WWII, cutting parts.

Then they linked the creative and Industrious past the music Industry in the 1970s in Manchester with Factory Records, and the Band on the Wall club.

There was a display on Stephen Hawking. It was inspiring how determined he was to keep going with engaging with people (being on the Simpsons and Star Trek) and pushing the clarity of his vision for Astrophysics. He was buried at Westminster Abbey with Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. 

Nearby is a Sunday school just like at DPC. At DPC this seems to be a copy of English conventions, but I wonder if this was in part sold by social issues of the time.

The city of Manchester, the City where my grandfather was born, is filled Industrial Revolution era buildings, with little time for gardens and no daffodils. 

It is not a place for poetic contemplation or aesthetic beauty, but for focus, productivity and people. It celebrates dynamism, progress, innovation and results.  

My grandmother once said describing a relative “he had a proper job you know, in an office.” She came from 1940s Britain and at the time (the 1980’s) I took that to mean, she meant they escaped working the plough in a field. What’s clear to me now is that she meant that they escaped working in a factory or a mill. They had left Britain at a time when opportunities for education were not readily available, and unemployment was increasing. They came to Australia, leaving a war-torn England, to provide opportunities and a life for their boys. 

An offshoot of the Bletchley Park museum, which leans more towards military stories, this Museum is a place for the stories of Britain’s computer Industry following World War 2.

They start with a largely working Bombe machine replica – ticking over to find combinations that might work against a particular encrypted message.

Inside of a rotor, fine brushes made contact with the commutators. These were cleaned with tweezers by an operator. (This was modelled on the Enigma machine’s rotors).

The rotors were plugged into the commuatators:

On the back were plugs (26 pins for the alphabet) which were matched up to each rotor depending on the instructions for the run.

To choose settings for the machine – you would check for a crib (like the weather report) to check for letters not translated (ie the ‘W’ in the Weather Report would never be translated to W – so you could exclude that as a possible translation with a sliding rule.

After the Bombe had ‘stopped’ – you took it to a checking machine to see if you had hit a valid combination.

Next they had the Lorenz Machine and the machines for cracking it – a more sophisticated 12 rotor (instead of 3 rotor) machine the German high command used for overall strategy.

The first machine they attempted to build to crack it was named the ‘Robinson Machine’ – because it was considered an unreliable bunch of wires. It had two tapes, which were always getting out of sync with the machine.

Their next attempt was the Colossus – built by people from the GPO who had worked on telephone exchanges.

It had a single rotating tape. (5 bits wide – one for each finger of your hand.)

There is a philosophical question about whether it was truly the first computer. It had shift registers and branching instructions, but no memory. It was not general-purpose programmable. I am truly on the fence on this question. (It seemed like a bunch of electronics to do statistical attack calculations, looking for the ordered pattern in the randomness of encryption possibilities.) Still it is very close to Turing’s Phd thesis model of a Mathematical computer running on a tape.

The leaders of Bletchley Park at the time were so impressed with the first demonstration they commissioned 3 more on the spot to be delivered in two months. (The builders had spent 11 months working 12 hour days for 6 days weeks to deliver this prototype.)

Tony Sale did a rebuild of the Colossus in 1994 after working to save the Bletchley site from developers in 1991. He got notes from an Harry Fensom who worked on the original Colossus. 

There is a profound historical parallel to the Biblical writings, where people don’t seek to preserve things by writing them down or publishing them, until or after the original people who experienced it were on their deathbeds roughly 40 years later.

The museum also had a rebuild of the EDSAC computer. It was built for the Cambridge Math’s department. This was significant because it had Turing’s design for storage, a mercury delay line, and had a form of assembly language converted down to binary.

They had a Harwell computer, made from Geiger Counters (10 bit cathode tubes). A one-off given to a Maths department. It was as slow as a human at calculations, but but resilient and less error-prone. It was an early general-purpose computer.

They had a mainframe memory core. From what we get our phrase ‘core dump’ still used in diagnostics today.

They had a software section with a programming language timeline.

A note about Sophie Wilson, who designed the Acorn System 1, co-designed the BBC Micro, and was involved in the design of the first ARM chip.

Then they went onto personal computers. There was a Be next to a Macintosh.

They had a section on portable Computers, including a couple of Apple’s I remember from my childhood.

They had a section on the development of smartphones, including an Apple Newton and the original iPhone box.

They had a Cray 1 Supercomputer from 1976. (Which my watch now beats in performance).

They had a Silicon Graphics workstation and a Sun workstation that I recall from Uni.

A driving club had come for a visit.

I recorded a train whizzing past (they seem to go faster here.) I estimated it was going about 145 km/h.

I couldn’t resist taking a photo of Rugby station.

My grandfather was born in Manchester and grew up grew up there. A manager at work once spoke with affection of the Manchester he grew up in. I wondered what it would be like.

The buildings around Manchester Piccadilly  Station look like they saw the Industrial Revolution.

Whilst walking to my accomodation, I sat on a bench with Allan Turing. He told me my journey was nearly at an end.

Walking along the streets in the evening, people aren’t in a rush, many make eye contact and smile. 

Walking through the streets on a Thursday evening big suites of tables from the pubs spread out into the streets, full of people talking. 

At the Tesco buying dinner I asked a question and the attendant replied, “of course you can!” With a kind of sparky charm that hid the fact he’d been working on his feet for hours. 

Manchester so far has come across as a compassionate,  sparky and empathetic place. History tells me that not that long ago this is was a place of high unemployment.  I imagine that in the post World War II childhood of my grandfather, this may have been a grim city.

As I step outside I see the bins queued up. Recycling (in this council) appears to be partitioned into cardboard/paper separated from cans and bottles, in addition to green waste and regular waste.

National Radio Centre

This is a kind of celebration of ham and amateur radio over the last 100 years – in a way that is educational about how radio works. They relate the theme of radio to how mobile phones have 5 different radio transmitters in them.

They link this to Bletchley Park by talking about WWII volunteers who listened to Morse code that was unusual, first within the UK and then overseas. (My speculation is that ‘unusual’ morse code is that not in English, or coded, or just unfamiliar.)

There are morse code transmitters.

They talk about thermionic  valve manufacturing in the UK as a successful enterprise. The replaced by transistors the business declined and transitioned. 

There is a detailed description of how radio works with interactive exhibits. 

They talk about the future of radio, in smart radio to make best use of limited bandwidth, nano medicine in taking smart pills that communicate externally and wearable technology in AI to project the virtual world in a way we can experience with our fingertips. 

Then there is an amateur radio section.  

They have a geosynchronous satellite over Africa to broadcast television that this facility has the ability to broadcast off on a radio ham frequency band . The OSCAR-100. It was launched in 2018.  It was paid for by the Sultan of Jordan.

On the way out you see a type-writer that generates Morse code on strips (and broadcasts them). 

Apart from seeing my Dad – this museum was one of the principal reasons I had come to the UK. (Turing’s influence on Computing are diverse – and I had read a great book on his PhD.)

I did spent six hours walking around, there as there is a lot to see and take in, a full day. The museum has intersecting themes here, of military history and significance, code-breaking, and development of computer technology. It’s big focus is people, and their experience of being on the code-breaking site.

I have written pages and pages of notes, and taken hundreds of photos during the day – but I’ll keep this brief.

The Mansion was built in the 1880s by a wealthy stockbroker, and his children sold it during WWII to Admiral Hugh Sinclair. It was purchased for its equal proximity to Cambridge and Oxford (they had a train line called Varsity connecting them at the time) and London.

People’s Experience

There is an enormous sense of careful stewardship of resources.

Of the moral obligation to keep secret due to the failures during WWI of spies listening into plans.

Signs at desks reminding people to “Keep At It!” that hint at the drain on people during the war. Stories of nervous breakdowns, and the the need for tennis matches, Scottish Dancing, Operatic Performances and Fencing Clubs.

Cracking Codes

There was a multi-step system for cracking codes that came in during the day.

The motor bike riders delivering messages skills in Morse code, repairing motor bikes, map reading, operating a sub machine gun, laying field cables from moving trucks. They were instructed to have zero curiosity about the message except where it was being carried. 

In 1940 they removed the road and railway signs to confuse a potential invading enemy. Some riders chose to vary routes in case they were being followed. Some had to drive around bomb debris in London. 

The riders could ride up to 1200 miles per week sometimes at night, dealing with ice and snow. The riders wore blue and white armbands identifying they were not to be held up by military patrol, and could ask military vehicles for petrol. 

Victory – VE Day

The Park had been storing information on punchcards, as a storage and retrieval system. When Victory was announced, the girls threw all the cards up in the air!

History of Development of Codebreaking

The Enigma machine had been developed by a German electrical engineer Arthur Scherbius in 1920. The (3-rotor) machines were common knowledge.

An English Mathematician had developed a system of cardboard strips to break Enigma codes. The challenge was with rotating settings and different plugboards, you had to keep re-cracking the day’s codes.

Turing had started work cracking Enigma codes as soon as WWII broke out. He wrote a detailed description of how it worked (he showed remarkable Engineering capabilities).

The Germans increased the choice of rotors in the Enigma – choosing 3 from 5 and inserted in any order. This made cracking the codes more difficult.

(Enigma Rotor)

The Polish developed a system of plugboards that had some effect for decrypting enigma codes.

Later the the Polish developed The “Bomba” (in Polish – something special – like icecream) to cycle through rotor positions. This had some effect to crack enigma codes).

Turing did a design for breaking Codes – called the Bombe machine.

This was built, and hundreds like it by the English and Americans, and they were run 24 hours a day. (The cigarette smoke was detected in the walls from the operators.

They had a model running (since all the originals were destroyed after the war.)

Hitler used a more secure machine called Lorenz for communications to Commanders. This was broken using a new machine called the Colossus. This is significant for signals intelligence on D-Day. (more on the Colossus tomorrow).

Enigma Types

There were many different types of enigma:

As I open the door, French accent drift by. A man pushing a pram. There are no cars on the curb today. There are a bunch of bicycles outside the dry cleaners. There are lots of people walking past wearing backpacks. People sit outside the Mediterranean bakery speaking in Eastern European. A regular morning at the University.

I enquire about bag storage. “De’re’s noow ba’ lo’or ‘oire,” the attendant helpfully offers at the station. As he picks up his crutch to stand, I see how Robert Louis Stevenson got his characters. 

As I walk along a street in Cambridge, the Australian rule of walking on the left leads to confusion of people walking the other way. Either there is no rule, the rule is in transition due to European influence, or they’re used to accommodating European pedestrians. To me it feels like a mixture of the first two, European standards quietly creeping in generationally. 

There was nothing to write home about for the Cambridge Science and Technology Museum.

The train driver to London belts along in a way that would seem out of place on a NSW train.

Laptop and phone charging at every seat on the train is a treat. 

Kings Cross to Euston on the underground. Change at Euston to get on the Birmingham train to Bletchley.  Walking through underground tunnels is definitely on the left, walking on escalators the left, pausing on escalators is the right. (It turns out the escalator rule is left over from the first escalators where the ending platform was diagonal, rewarding those in a hurry on the left.)

The Population of Bletchley and surrounds is 287,000 which is slightly more than the population of Wollongong. It feels suburban, in a way that London, Cambridge and Bridport did not. Curved rows of houses mostly separated from each other, cut-de-sacs no shops or pubs in sight. Probably designed in a post-car age.  Some of the houses feel like old Wahroonga, sweeping trees and hedges and gravel driveways. 

Whilst I wash some clothes getting ready for dinner, I get an email saying that I’m entitled to compensation as my train was delayed 15 minutes. All I had to do was fill out a form. What an interesting effect of privatised trains. With long distance trains at home, you would get what you get and not get upset. 

As I step outside a sporty Mercedes pulls onto the curb in front of me. Another engine revs in the distance. A BMW pulls into view, driven at speed, the engine working hard. 

Women in Burkhas step into a supermarket. Men in white hats and white skirts queue outside a Mediterranean coffee shop selling pastries. The end of Ramadan.

I pause and have a sausage roll. Inside it has a German wurst-style sausage and a line of tomato-puree baked into the puffed pastry. 

Cambridge has a population of 124,000 and with surrounding suburbs probably even greater. It will take 30 minutes to walk across the town to where I’m headed. It puts the spin on the word “university” as a group of separate teaching colleges gathered around the same area.

On my way walking , find an avenue ringing with birdsong.

Then I come to a cemetery overgrown with brambles. 

Further I come to a path near the railway and then to a mall car park, having a carpet store, baby perambulation, a Subway and M&S. In the M&S there is aisle called “Boxed Chocolate and Picnic”. 

At the Cambridge Computer History Museum I am welcomed by a 16 processor on the wall made from scratch from transistors. Designed for education and inspiration, it gently rebukes me for more bringing my own hex program to run. It offers to play Tetris on a large matrix of normal size LCDs. (More photos at the link).

The museum invites me into a stylised 1970s office. 

Then into a stylised 1980s computer classroom. 

One theme is people solving the problem in front of them with the tools available. Lots of incremental improvements, but many bunched up close together. A few giants stand out. The museum wants to celebrate Sinclair and ARM as being the companies close to home. 

The museum notes that the British computer industry minimised to an extent in the late 1980s and a lot of the value chain moved to software. The value of computer engineers was able to be channelled into companies like ARM holdings. There was much convergence in hardware.

Museums are a funny mix of old bits organised into displays, nostalgia, a celebration that something significant happened and education, all constrained by the funding available. 

A ponder for a moment whether it helps people move forward and look to the future by looking at the past. I see a glorious past and amazing possibilities for the future but I wonder what others would see. There is so much here and too much to write about now. I’ll put most of the photos in the link.

Off to the Whipple Museum for science. A 40 min walk.

Whipple was a successful instrument-maker with a big personal collection donated in 1944 – which has been running as a museum for 80 years. It celebrates the theme of measurement in science, ie that better measurement lead to better models and understanding. (Acknowledging the role of calculation as well.)

It had an scanning electron microscope similar to the one Watson and Crick used for mapping DNA.

The museum also acknowledged the history and role of globes in mapping the earth, the heavens and other planets.

Walking back, I walked past more bakeries. The baking scene here is truly next level. 

I walk back through a magnificent park. 

I buy a small treat for afternoon tea and later dinner dessert. It has a layer of chocolate cake, a layer of coffee cream, a layer of regular cream, and a layer of burnt caramel on top, sprinkled with chocolate shavings on the sides. 

In the morning, as we walk along the back lane, steam puffs out of bathroom vents in the chill air and a black cat perches on an old stone wall. 

Wooden toys on the kerb indicate market day. 

As we sit down to breakfast the barista catches my eye, “w’ ar’ y’ trinkin’ sar?” with a Dublin accent that could just as easily say “tap’ o’ th’ marning t’ ye”.

I chat to Dad about ways to fix his computer. Conversation turns to updating his business website. 

Morning walk through the Saturday markets, second hand book stalls, tie dye tshirts and toys.

A town cryer calls out, public meeting times for local community groups. 

A street band kicks up a jaunty tune.

Dad takes me back to Crewkerne station.

A train flies back to Waterloo at what feels like speeds comfortably over 100km/h. (I’m told this line can hit 160km/h.) This driver is not holding back. 

On the Underground at Russell Square the intercom announces a fire at Kings Cross prevents the train from stopping there. Everyone on the train shrugs and gets off. The only option is to walk 800m to the next station. At this point I’m glad I brought at suitcase with wheels. 

Halfway to Kings Cross we see a big group of suitcase-walkers coming the other way. 

The mix of accents on the train include: loose-tongue London, northern Toff, received English, some Birmingham and some Novocastrian. 

It’s difficult to describe an analogue for Cambridge Station – Redfern perhaps – but not really. It is big in scale, and yet small in intimacy. 

Coming into Cambridge station and walking out in to the main street, it shouts “we’re here to solve concrete problems and do business.”

The younger 20s people here are completely multicultural, but I get a sense that the teaching staff are largely English. There are all nations of undergraduates in the Chinese restaurants, young couples pushing prams, and the pubs seem filled with 30s+ Anglo people. 

I drag my suitcase down small streets of two story houses with pubs, Afghan restaurants, pretend Coop supermarkets that sell Aldi goods, noodle houses.