on photography and technology.
Asides
The Colossus Bletchley Park machine
Brief history about some of the Bletchley park machines:
Max Newman called in the help of Tommy Flowers, a brilliant Post Office Electronics Engineer. Flowers went on to design and build ‘Colossus’, a much faster and more reliable machine that used 1,500 thermionic valves (vacuum tubes). The first Colossus machine arrived at Bletchley in December 1943. This was the world’s first practical electronic digital information processing machine - a forerunner of today’s computers.
Lorenz had to be cracked by carrying out complex statistical analyses on the intercepted messages. Colossus could read paper tape at 5,000 characters per second and the paper tape in its wheels travelled at 30 miles per hour.
Pretty amazing stuff.
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© 2008 Al Power. 
I saw the reconstructed Colossus on my recent trip to Bletchley. The paper tape was certainly moving fast - it looked like you would get a paper cut to remember if you touched it! Photo of the tape here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrstopher/2926731347/
Obviously the stationary tape was more photogenic than the tape moving at 30mph…