[ Thanks to An Anonymous
Reader for this link. ]
“The title of ‘first computer lab’ is probably a three-way tie,
but we’ll start with Bletchley Park, the home of Great Britain’s
World War II cryptography efforts. Bletchley Park was tasked with
not only decrypting the communications of Hitler’s Nazi wehrmacht,
but with devising new cryptographic systems to keep Allied armies
and navies safe.“Even today, 65 years after the War, we are not entirely sure
which inventions originated from Bletchley Park because of the
Official Secrets Act that its 12,000 staff were required to sign.
We know that public key encryption was invented there, and Alan
Turing (of the Turing machine) certainly invented more than just
the bombe, which was one of the first electromechanical computers
and the key to cracking of Germany’s Enigma crypto system.
Bletchley Park was also home to the first programmable digital
computer, the Colossus.”