Speaking at this event will be:
John Pether, TNMOC: 'Intercepting Lorenz signals'
The first indications that the Germans were using radio teleprinter transmissions was in the latter half of 1940. This early intercept work was carried out by the Metropolitan Police, on behalf of the Foreign Office. It was apparent the standard teleprinter signals were being encrypted by an unknown device. The unknown device was the Lorenz SZ42 cipher attachment. When these messages were decrypted they revealed Hitler's communications to and between the German High Command. The result was the shortening of the war and saving countless lives.
Steve Roberts, Selex-ES: '100 Years of Electronic Warfare'
In 1914, Marconi engineers based in Chelmsford detected radio signals from German airships. The British Royal Navy recognised the importance of this and set up a chain of Direction-Finding stations on the East Coast of the UK. By 1916, a network had been established that enabled successful defence of the UK from air attacks. In the 2nd World War, the German Air Defence system was very effective, using a mixture of radar, radio and EW systems. The British and American activities to defeat this Air Defence system, and later variants produced by the Warsaw Pact, employed a wide range of equipment that would be familiar to the Electronic Warfare engineers of 2014. This talk commemorates 100 years of British activity in Electronic Warfare in support of Air Operations.
Andy Sutton, University of Salford: 'Liberating the laptop: an overview of cellular data communications'
This talk will review those early days of mobile data and present a display of PCMCIA data cards and their replacement; the USB dongle, the latter leading to what was commonly known as “dongle mania” as mobile data traffic levels grew at a phenomenal rate.
The museum, located at Bletchley Park, is an independent charity housing the largest collection of functional historic computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer. TNMOC enables visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of the 1940s through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s. New working exhibits are regularly unveiled and the public can already view a rebuilt and fully operational Colossus, the restored Harwell Dekatron / WITCH computer, an ICL 2966, one of the workhorse mainframes computers of the 1980s, many of the earliest desktops of the 1980s and 1990s, plus the NPL Technology of the Internet Gallery. (Please note that the museum is a separate entity to the Bletchley Park Trust.)
The Wireless Heritage SIG is championed by Stirling Essex of Espansivo, Steve Haseldine of Deaf Alerter, Andy Sutton of EE, Geoff Varrall of RTT Online and Nigel Wall of Climate Associates.
To follow this SIG on Twitter, @CambWireless, please use #CWWH
This event is in partnership with
The National Museum of Computing