So, I visited two of the holiest sites in cryptography (as well as philology and computer science) this weekend.

Brit
• Egypt
  • alot of dead people and their grave goods
  • information on hieroglyphics, and later writings (demotic? )
  • the Rosetta Stone, proof the hieroglyphs were language and greatest crib in ancient language (argue?)
• Celtic Britain
• Roman Britain
• Medievil(sp) Europe
• Reading Room
  • a fantastic library in a huge dome-topped atrium building in the middle of the Great Courtyard
  • primary collection is accessible to the public: just find and sit down to read
  • a few (Dell) workstations running the museum's COMPASS system and library catalog
  • I found the linguistics section :)
  • I read the first chapter or so of:

    The Decipherment of Linear B

    John Chadwick's description of the completely insane way Linear B was cracked (by ??). Insprirational and informative to philologists and cryppies alike. ISBN 0-521-39830-4

    Reading the Past: Cuneiform to Alphabet

    An anthology collecting the books Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Linear B & Related Scripts, The Early Alphabet, Greek Inscriptions, and Etruscan ISBN 0-7141-8077-7 (oop!)

    Chinese

    The RtP Chinese book, too new for the anthology, which also left out Mathematics & Measurement, Maya Glyphs, and Runes. Explains what SMC is and how many "dialects" are still commonly used with a handy map. Explained tonal system and started to unravel kanji design in respect to homonyms.

  • The museum bookshop (around behind the library) had the RtP: Linear B, Cuneiform and Chinese books, but I was informed that the RtP anthollogy is out of print and no consideration of another run is being made of yet.
  • A historical bookshop had the anthology in stock, but I couldn't afford it this weekend. I'd like to go back for it. It is a fantastic book, and she had it for 13 GBP, only 2 quid more than the cover price..

  On Sunday, I again managed to get up at noon and rush off to the train station. Almost three hours later I was at Bletchley Park, base of the British cryptographers and mathematicans who broke the ENIGMA machine cypher, thus ensuring Allied victory in World War Two (and inventing computers and computer science as we know them in the process).

  • ENIGMA machines, including one to beat on
  • an exhibit based around the recovered Abwehr Enigma, it's theft, ransom, oddness, and recovery
  • the Bombes, cryptanalytic computers (think brute force)
  • Colossus, the first electronic computer (good sized room all to hisself, still being worked on / reassembled )
  • the Retro Computer Museum at BP, whose displayed collection includes:
    • PDP-8 and PDP-11
    • Vaxen
    • teletypes and print terminals
    • Sinclair z-80s
    • TRS-80
    • Apple II, Lisa
    • Mac 128k, SE, II, LC II, Quadra
    • numerous early TV display machines from passed on OEMs
    • Atari ST
    • Acorn workstations
    • an early Sun workstation
    • an early portable (luggable)

  I geeked around with the tech in the retrobeep museum, and quite earnestly offered to help network and web-ify the kit that could be. I tried to emphasize how it could be done with discarded hardware, noting the firewalls and servers I build out of 386 and 486 class machines (We commiserated about obsolecence.) I hope he / they contact me, but I doubt it :( They don't yet have an Internet connection to the museum yet (*gasp*). Until they get that I won't be much help, but once they're on, I can do a lot of useful things remotely (...).

  I had tea in the Crypto Cafe (!), and I managed to buy an Enigma adric jabber org BP bookmark (1.25 GBP) before walking back down to the rail station. (In my exuberance to investigate the bombe running on a small workstation in the crypto museum, I missed the flyby of some WW II era fighters (although I did hear the air-raid siren and the planes passing over). I had thought that it was the Polish doing the flyby, as this weekend was some kind of big deal for them (Polish cryppies and mathematicans made the first break in German Enigma traffic, allowing all the work at Bletchley). I later heard there was a Spitfire in the mix. Oh well, I got to twist rotors and beat on the keys of an actual Enigma machine!

  Recap: the Rosetta Stone, quite as big as crib as any diplomat's enciphered transmission of local news paper stories (Yes, they actaully do that. Look at the Egyptian campaign of WWII around El-Alamein, if memory serves..)
  ) and Bletchley Park, where the first electric and electronic computers (specifically, Colossus is the first programmable digital computer) were built to crack a machine cipher called Enigma, two of cryptology's (et al) greatest shrines.

  And last night I read through the introduction and first two lessons of the self-guided Quenya (cwen-ya) [Elvish] course, after glancing over and seeing about a dozen new (con) languages (!). (Link to conlangs LJ, then to conlangs geocities (ich) site, bottom left for i quenya [the Elvish]). I got an MP3 of J. R. R. Tolkein reading an Elvish poem, but I haven't gotten to hear it yet (I emailed it to m'self).

  
  
  

  adric, roehampton.ac.uk, 22:27 14 July 2002