Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.
Milton Keynes is the largest settlement in Buckinghamshire, England, 50 miles (80 km) north-west of London. At the 2011 Census, the population of its urban area was almost 230,000. The River Great Ouse forms its northern boundary; a tributary, the River Ouzel, meanders through its linear parks and balancing lakes. Approximately 25% of the urban area is parkland or woodland and includes two Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs).
A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is often an LCD, AMOLED or OLED display while the system is usually a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. A user can give input or control the information processing system through simple or multi-touch gestures by touching the screen with a special stylus or one or more fingers. Some touchscreens use ordinary or specially coated gloves to work while others may only work using a special stylus or pen. The user can use the touchscreen to react to what is displayed and, if the software allows, to control how it is displayed; for example, zooming to increase the text size.
Thomas Harold Flowers, BSc, DSc, MBE was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.
The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th-century census of England. It has been cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
Aswarby and Swarby is a civil parish in the North Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, England. Aswarby is the ecclesiastical parish formed in 1850 from the two ancient parishes of Asarby and Swarby. The civil parish of Asarby and Swarby also includes Crofton. The parish therefore consists of both Aswarby and Swarby.
A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers, do what other personal computers do, but lack some input/output (I/O) abilities that others have. Modern tablets largely resemble modern smartphones, the only differences being that tablets are relatively larger than smartphones, with screens 7 inches (18 cm) or larger, measured diagonally, and may not support access to a cellular network.
The digital dark age is a lack of historical information in the digital age as a direct result of outdated file formats, software, or hardware that becomes corrupt, scarce, or inaccessible as technologies evolve and data decay. Future generations may find it difficult or impossible to retrieve electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format, or on an obsolete physical medium, for example, floppy disks. The name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there could be a relative lack of records in the digital age, as documents are transferred to digital formats and original copies are lost. An early mention of the term was at a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in 1997. The term was also mentioned in 1998 at the Time and Bits conference, which was co-sponsored by the Long Now Foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute.
In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface to recognize the presence of more than one point of contact with the surface at the same time. The origins of multitouch began at CERN, MIT, University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University and Bell Labs in the 1970s. CERN started using multi-touch screens as early as 1976 for the controls of the Super Proton Synchrotron. Capacitive multi-touch displays were popularized by Apple's iPhone in 2007. Plural-point awareness may be used to implement additional functionality, such as pinch to zoom or to activate certain subroutines attached to predefined gestures.
East West Rail is a major project to establish a strategic railway connecting East Anglia with Central, Southern and Western England. In particular, it plans to build a line linking Oxford and Cambridge via Bicester, Milton Keynes and Bedford, largely using the trackbed of the former Varsity Line. Thus it provides a route between any or all of the Great Western, Chiltern, West Coast, Midland, East Coast, West Anglia, Great Eastern and the Cotswold main lines, avoiding London. The new line will provide a route for potential new services between Southampton Central and Ipswich or Norwich via Reading, Didcot and Ely, using existing onward lines. The government approved the western section in November 2011, with completion of this section expected by 2025. As of January 2019, the company aims to complete the Central section by "the mid 2020s". As of March 2020, electrification of the line is not planned, but the 2019 decision is under review. The plan is divided into three sections:
Anthony Edgar "Tony" Sale, FBCS was a British electronic engineer, computer programmer, computer hardware engineer, and historian of computing. He led the construction of a fully functional Mark 2 Colossus computer between 1993 and 2008. The rebuild is exhibited at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in England.
The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers in the 1980s for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed with an emphasis on education, it was notable for its ruggedness, expandability, and the quality of its operating system. An accompanying 1982 television series, The Computer Programme, featuring Chris Serle learning to use the machine, was broadcast on BBC2.
The Harwell computer, later known as the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH), or the Harwell Dekatron Computer, is an early British computer of the 1950s based on valves and relays. From 2009 to 2012, it was restored at the National Museum of Computing. In 2013, for the second time, the Guinness Book of World Records recognised it as the world's oldest working digital computer, following its restoration. It previously held the title for several years until it was decommissioned in 1973. The museum uses the computer's visual, dekatron-based memory to teach schoolchildren about computers.
A census of the population of the United Kingdom is taken every ten years. The 2011 census was held in all countries of the UK on 27 March 2011. It was the first UK census which could be completed online via the Internet. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is responsible for the census in England and Wales, the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) is responsible for the census in Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is responsible for the census in Northern Ireland.
The Centre for Computing History is a museum in Cambridge, England, established to create a permanent public exhibition telling the story of the Information Age.
Susan Elizabeth Black is a British computer scientist, academic and social entrepreneur. She has been instrumental in saving Bletchley Park, the site of World War II codebreaking, with her Saving Bletchley Park campaign. Since 2018, she has been Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University. She was previously based at the University of Westminster and University College London.
In computing, a stylus is a small pen-shaped instrument whose tip position on a computer monitor can be detected. It is used to draw, or make selections by tapping. While devices with touchscreens such as newer computers, mobile devices, game consoles, and graphics tablets can usually be operated with a fingertip, a stylus provides more accurate and controllable input. The stylus has the same function as a mouse or touchpad as a pointing device; its use is commonly called pen computing.
Peter William Armstrong is a television and radio producer, whose career at the BBC spanned 25 years. He is best known for innovative religious programming and as the founder and project editor of the BBC's Domesday Project (1986), for which he won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2004 BAFTAs. He is the father of documentary maker Franny Armstrong.
The College of National Security was a proposed cyber security school for 16-19 year-olds, scheduled to open in September 2020 at Bletchley Park.
