It is called the National Codes Centre and is a heritage site and museum. It was the centre of codebreaking in the war, and 8,500 people worked there. The Germans had the Enigma machine (also on display)to send coded messages. In 1939/40 Alan Turing devised the "bombe" (a polish name), to help search for the right settings, and a number were installed which ran day and night. It has taken 13 years to rebuild one of these machines as they were destroyed at the end of the war.
The allies used a five wheel Typex machine to send codes, and this was adapted to the Enigma'a three wheel to type the messages once the settings were found.
The site is quite large. Some of the huts are in need of repair and funds are needed to improve facilities.
The other interesting exhibit, in huts on the edge of the site, is the Colossus rebuild. By 1943, the Germans had a more sophisticated coding machine called Lorenz. Colossus is called "the world's first semi-programmable electronic computer" and was built to read Lorenz messages. Again, Collosus was taken apart after the war and the web site http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ explains "the Americans have got away with the myth that the ENIAC was the first large scale digital calculator in the world. It was not, but they got away with it because Colossus was kept secret until the 70's."
Colossus has now ben rebuilt and is working with it's 2,500 valves (mostly obtained free from defunct telephone exchanges) in constant operation. When a Cipher challege was won by a German software engineer who decoded a message in 46 seconds using eight pentium processors and a modern pc, Colossus whirred away for 3hours and 15 minutes to get the same answer. Not bad for a 1944 Mark 2.
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