At Bletchley Park today the team that spent 14 years reconstructing the Turing Bombe received an Engineering Heritage Award from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

The bombe replica has been running (on and off) for a couple of years now, and it is nice to have such a huge (and entirely volunteer) effort rewarded, particularly as until recently it looked like Bletchley Park was going to be allowed to crumble into dust.

Although not strictly a "computer" (in that it was not universally programmable) the bombe was probably the first "hacking engine". Prior to it, there had been no automated way to break encypherment independent of the legitimate cipher machine in question, which is why it qualifies as a breakthrough in the field of security.

As the Bletchley Park press office pointed out to me, the bombe succeeded in breaking Enigma traffic with odds against brute force of 158 million million million to one. Not bad for a purely mechanical device. Of course pride of place for the first mechanical computer usually goes to Charles Babbage, although his "Difference Engine No.2" did not actually get built until 1991 by the Science Museum. Babbage's engine was a general purpose calculator, but a more specialist device pips it roundly to the post. The Antikythera, a corroded bronze mechanism found in 1901 at the site of a Mediterranean shipwreck dating from 70 BC, was finally established a couple of years back to be an astronomical calculator built from 37 gear wheels.

There's nothing new under the Sun, it seems, but the Bombe comes top for complexity and significance.

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