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@peterrenshaw@ioc.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

Shop keeper Phyllis used her computer system to automate book keeping, taking the time to prepare from five hours to five minutes.

Having learned the system down to hardware level, Phyllis is now building an electronics kit. Her aim? Build a computer herself; Or as we called it an “electronic gadget”.

What Phyllis doesn’t say is she was a maths graduate from University and “#Cypher Clerk” in “Hut 5” at #BletchleyPark during the war.

The”Official Secrets Act” was in force in 1983 😂🤣☺️

#UK / WW2 / #computing / #bombe / #SigInt / #accounts / #hardware #kits / #Commodore / #PET / #RetroComputing
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@peterrenshaw@ioc.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

Young’uns forget after WW2 a fair percentage of the male population in the UK were trained to kill. The rest including women served in many public and military jobs including code breaking.

This is of course, conjecture but Phyllis seems quite adept at putting the machine to work crunching numbers and knows discrete electronics. The difference between single and dual potentiometers, capacitors.

A tell is “electronic gadget.”

According to the YT comments, Phyllis passed away in 2020. It’s conceivable Phyllis was almost 60 here. Easily old enough to have lived through WW2.
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@peterrenshaw@ioc.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

Approximately 8000 women worked at #BletchleyPark during WW2.

One codebreaker I can quickly look up is #JaneFawcett MBE.

“In 1940, at the age of 18, she was interviewed by senior #codebreaker#StuartMilnerBarry, and joined the secret codebreaking project at Bletchley Park. She joined a group of women known as the "#Debs of Bletchley Park",

… “Hughes was assigned to Hut 6 a "Decoding Room" of women only”.

“On 25 May 1941, Hughes and several other women were briefed on the search for the German battleship #Bismarck. Shortly thereafter, she decoded a message referring to the Bismarck that detailed its current position and destination in France.“

“Her work did not come to light until decades later, during the 1990s, as it had been classified under Britain's Official Secrets Act”.

Jane passed away in 2016.

#OSA / #WW2 / #CodeBreaker / #personal <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Fawcett>