Thursday, April 22, 2010

Mind of a Code Breaker

On You Tube there's a great documentary video from NOVA called World War II Mind of a Code Breaker. It's the story of the British code breakers in Bletchley park and explains the vital role code breaking and Signals Intelligence played during the Second World War.

The documentary tells the story of the German Enigma and Lorenz cipher machines. Visit the playlist to see all episodes. It's a 12 part video (113 minutes), so take your time for it. It's well worth watching!


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it available on tape or DVD?

Dirk Rijmenants said...

No idea. As with most documentaries about cryptography, probably not.

Jerry McCarthy said...

You could try contacting Nova at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/feedback/ and asking them.

Dirk Rijmenants said...

Tried NOVA's shop, didn't find it...

http://www.shoppbs.org/family/index.jsp?cp=2729308&categoryId=2883345&view=all

From what I see on the video, it seems a very old VHS. Many of the people on thee video don't live any more...

Dirk Rijmenants said...

Found an on-line piece about this subject:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/mind.html

Apparently, it was broadcast as a TV program in September 1999:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/listseason/26.html#2615

The main pages is called "Decoding Nazi Secrets"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/

Dirk Rijmenants said...

I have no ideo of the author of these youtube uploads, but I found their "offical page", which seems most interesting. It appears to be all material in the public domain. These are all some very - old documentaries:

http://www.youtube.com/user/2bn442RCT

Jerry McCarthy said...

On the subject of YouTube links, I recently found this tour of Bletchley Park, given by one of their tour guides. It's in 9 parts, the first of which is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmMFp2FQPsY

Well worth watching, IMHO, and contains a little more technical detail than the "real" tour which you get if you go to BP.