This is just a thought, Ron. From the timing it is quite possible.
That sorting you were doing could have been part of the Venona project and you could perhaps have been helping to search for the double use of the one time pads. Some poor soul(s) had to do it. They say that there were 'hundreds of thousands ' of messages but only about 3,000 were read to any degree. You can (if you have not already done so) see the efforts to decrypt these on the NSA Venona website.
The continuous paper could perhaps have been the output from Hollerith - later to become IBM - machines rather than a computer. I thought though that they used punched cards in the main.
A slight digression; you don't see much mention of IBM and the Nazis and the immense contribution that they made to the 'Holocaust''. It just shows what a wonderful job a good P.R company can make to hiding the truth from the unwashed masses.
Sounds and smells are very evocative. It would be good to have some morse and Russian voice traffic playing in the background (see my recent forum topic). Do you think that all those Russian voice tapes we listened to in training are still in a storecupboard somewhere at GCHQ?
As for smells, how about spreading a few pieces of toast thickly with pilchards and leaving them at strategic points. Ah, those midty pilchards! The memory lingers still.
And bacon sandwiches too. And the cook coming in after we had done the mid to 4 and had consumed (yet again) all the bacon. I had forgotten the pilchards though. I still love them but, embarrassingly, covered in a curry sauce. Straight out of the Bay of Bengal cooking.
I do like the idea of the tape. There is a similar one for the Brixmis display which works well. Can you lot not remember enough Russian to put something together for me? Are you up to the challenge Edward?
Haven’t looked at the Venona site yet but I will do. I think you have been reading the Ladybird ‘How it works – The Computer’ You are right about the punched cards but even so I think computers were used quite extensively at that time. I believe, but can’t verify, that the U S forces used Honeywell. Maybe someone closer to the ‘engine room’ will enlighten me. Sorting data cards with a holerith was a long and laborious process as I believe t that they could only sort on one character at a time. Not good when you have up to 80 characters and a large number of cards.
Not long after demob I was using computer output – many people were but probably didn’t realise it. We had an ICT mainframe about the size of a small semi detached house and the punched cards were used for input and output of data. We had at least a platoon of young lady ‘punch operators transferring the data to 80 column cards all day to feed the monster. We had mechanical card sorters, readers and printers which may have been updated Holeriths. The continuous stationery I referred to earlier was 13 or 15 inches wide and was standard at least up to the late eighties – for all I know it may be still in use.
Gordon re background noise - you didn’t mention teleprinters, the oscillation noises when you strayed off a frequency and that pen and ink thing that transferred high speed Morse onto paper tape.
Tastes and smells – the most memorable taste from Langeleben, for the wrong reason. I covered a hot coffee with an information board to keep the mayflies out. The only problem was that the sheet was covered in acetate which melted into the coffee. I’ve never tasted anything as bad!
"Coffee"?
I never tasted coffee throughout my stay in Langeleben other than the Nescafe I took back with me. I always believed that our official coffee supplies were waylaid, en route, to keep the officers (and sergeants?) in relative comfort in Frau Grahn's. Not unreasonably as they certainly could not sell the ciggies that made our lives so much more bearable.
You seem to have done so much more than I, Ron, or is it that my memory is lousy. Were you doing these thinga at Langeleben or the Regt.?Often when prompted I think that there were vast tranches that I do not recall. I still to this day, however, remember making an absolute cock-up of a message using OTP's for which I expected nothing less than a court martial. The 'Powers that be' probably thought "Typical Bloody Croxson!" There was a teleprinter room/hut, next to the I Corps hut, at least in 1955 with that enormous reel of punched paper that was Dave Rackliffe's little Empire that he guarded so strenuously. He had a chap called Ron Meake working with him in those days, who I literally bumped into in Piccadilly, some time after 1958. He was a policeman by then.
Am I dreaming or were we woken up with stainless steel buckets of tea? And did we extend the same courtesy to the Watch that followed?
When first faced with a pint mug of tea I thought 'I'll never get through all this'. It wasn't long before I was up for seconds, Bromide and all.
It could have been tea, Paul, but I’m sure we had coffee as well in’ 56.
As to my activities I didn’t do all that many different jobs. The noises I described were experienced when I was on watch in Birgelin. When we first moved there only half of the set room was used and the other half had various bits of equipment left there and used intermittently. There seemed to be a lot of empty space behind the D/F desk. I came off the watch rota to go on leave, transferred to the teleprinters section and then on to Langeleben. Shortly after I arrived we were allocated an extra office wagon dedicated to the teleprinters section. Intercepts weren’t printed on site but sent back to Birgelin on magnetic tape with the daily reports.
Don’t remember Dave but I must have met him on changeover.
Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:58 pm Post subject: Sounds (Numbers and Co)
Hello Paul, et al.
You were asking about sound sources for a background tape driven exhibit at Chigwell?
Remembering that such noises drive people crazy, (See members of this group, lol) I would suggest that the visitors get to put on a headset, and hold down a Morse key (as a simple Press button) to start a sound byte...
As a extra you could have a list of stations to go to from exhibit to exhibit, and record what you thought you heard, no upper limit to the number of times to retry, making it a challenge for young and old alike...
AND the sounds (well as many as can be found on-line at the moment) can be had here...
The site owner writes, "Please do not use samples from this site without permission. (c) Spook007" and gives "Email/Comments to: spook007@freeuk(no spam).com remove (no spam)"
I think he would be quite willing if he knows it is not going to appear on the Internet as a competitive audio source to his collection, and may be worth approaching him to ask...
Another source is this site, which has difficult to hear (low S/N ratios Numbers, as well as Hi-Speed Morse burst, RTTY, and other sounds, etc.
(all the sound tracks on this BBC report come from the above two sites)
Also (although many of the links to such sites have now disappeared) there is the Conet Project, and some of the records from that deleted site can still be recovered and found here...
and last but not least the words to the Lincolnshire Poacher
printed at York about 1776
When I was bound apprentice, in famous Lincolnsheer,
Full well I served my master, for more than seven year,
Till I took up with poaching, as you shall quickly hear:
Oh! 'tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.
As me and my companions were setting of a snare,
'Twas then we seed the gamekeeper, for him we did not care,
For we can wrestle and fight, my boys, and jump o'er everywhere:
Oh! 'tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.
As me and my comrades were setting four or five,
And taking on him up again, we caught the hare alive;
We caught the hare alive, my boys, and through the woods did steer:
Oh! 'tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.
I threw him on my shoulder and then we trudged home
We took him to a neighbor's house, and sold him for a crown;
We sold him for a crown, my boys, but I did not tell you where
Oh, 'tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
Bad luck to every magistrate that lives in Lincolnsheer;
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare;
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer:
Oh! 'tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.
Regards
Petra _________________ Petra (Mrs. P. Henderson),
ex Royal Signals, 1971-1976
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