A debt to the past

At the Accounting & Bookkeeping College we are delighted to learn that some effort is being made to preserve Bletchley Park, not a million miles away from here. Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has announced £250,000 funding for Bletchley Park museum.

The work of Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park helped bring computers into the modern world and is rightly celebrated. Computers have transformed our lives, not least in the field of bookkeeping and accounts so that we no longer live in a world of Bob Cratchits scratching figures into soul-destroying ledgers. Now that the hard labour has been relieved anyone can maintain good business accounts as long as they have learned the skill of double-entry bookkeeping.

The wartime devotion of the staff at Bletchley Park was dedicated to the field of codes and ciphers. As computers and the Internet have become such an important part of our lives encryption has been a vital enabling technology. As long as you don't present your username and password details to anyone else you can safely buy, sell and do all your banking on the Internet. Many businesses rely mainly or entirely on online sales that would not be possible otherwise.

So lets not forget that we owe a real debt to the war effort at Bletchley Park both technologically and financially.