Google Donates £550,000 to Bletchley Park Restoration Project

A philanthropic move by internet giant Google has seen the princely sum of £550,000 being put into the hands of the Bletchley Park restoration project, as part of a fundraiser designed to remodel and restore sections of the collection of huts where a team of British cryptographers lead by Alan Turing worked on deciphering complex German cipher codes using very early ancestors of modern computer machinery.

Collosus, possibly the world’s oldest computer.

The bulk of the funding is required to extensively renovate the site, which today is the home of the British National Museum of Computing, as well as build a new exhibition in a derelict section of huts. Most will be donated by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has pledged to give £4.6 million on the condition that £1.7 million of additional funds be raised from other interests outside of their organisation.

Google’s efforts for the project have already been extensive, with fundraising campaigns including a £63000 purchase of forgotten papers detailing early specifications for a basic computer and ‘computable numbers’ – an automatic machine designed to read and manipulate special symbols on a tape through mathematical algorithms. The money was raised over a weekend from sources across Google Google cloud computing executive Simon Meacham, who learned of the papers via a Tweet by Bletchley Park restoration campaigners.

Google is no stranger to algorithms and computational mathematics, as their search engine is a hotbed of high end calculations and equations used for page indexing and ranking. “I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that without Alan Turing, Google in the form we know it would not exist,” said Peter Barron, Google’s head of external relations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa

The site’s future looks bright, as the park itself had been kept secret after the war since about 20 years ago, and the equipment there destroyed. But now, as money and interest in the site as a sort of ‘British Silicon Valley’ pours in from all over the world, Bletchley Park may receive the international interest it deserves for the work that was conducted there.

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