Revival Of The Tunny Machine!

The National Museum of Computing has finally restored the Tunny Machine, also called the code-cracker of the Allied Forces during World War II. The rebuilding of the machine is a big achievement, considering that no circuit diagrams of the components survived.

The encrypted orders of Hitler to his Generals were decoded with the help of this Tunny machine. The Intelligence gathered because of this code breaking at Bletchley is the key reason of the success of Allied Forces to end the WWII.

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A team led by John Pether and John Whetter re-started the restoration work on this machine in Bletchley in 2005. According to Mr. Pether, this rebuilding was stimulating-ly difficult due to the lack of source material. "As far as I know there were no original circuit diagrams left," he said. "All we had was a few circuit elements drawn up from memory by engineers who worked on the original. The trickiest part of the rebuild was to get all the six timing circuits of the machine working in unison." The rebuild of this machine required a formidable amount of rewiring.

Mathematician Bill Tutte was the first one to build the Tunny machine, way back in 1942. The radio signals that Hitler sent to the Nazi high command were intercepted and analyzed, and then the plans for the machine were finalized.

Encryption of these orders was possible because of a machine known as Lorenz SZ42. The messages/orders were made to pass through this machine before reaching the Generals.

The Tunny machine reversed the working of SZ42, in order to decipher the code. Tunny worked along with the Colossus computer, which computed the settings of an SZ42 used to scramble a particular message. These settings were reproduced on Tunny, the encrypted message was fed in, and the decrypted text was printed out.

The Tunny machines survived the same fate as the Colossus computers, and were dismantled and recycled for spare parts after WWII.

About 12-15 Tunny machines were in use by the end of World War II, and aided the Russians by revealing information about the Nazi battle plans during the battle of Kursk and thus ensured their success.

"We have a great deal of admiration for Bill Tutte and those original engineers," said John Whetter. "There were no standard drawings they could put together," he said. "It was all original thought and it was incredible what they achieved. One reason the restoration project has succeeded was that the machines were built by the Post Office's research lab at Dollis Hill."

All the parts were typically used to build telephone exchanges, he said. "Those parts were in use from the 1920s to the 1980s when they were replaced by computer-controlled exchanges," he said.

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Source: Code-cracking machine returned to life - BBC News Image Credit: #-Link-Snipped-#