The Machines That Sparked the Beginning of the Computer Age 139
jjp9999 writes "A war of spies and electromechanical machines that took place beneath the wires during World War II not only played a crucial role in the Allies' victory, but also helped spark the beginning of the computer age. Among the devices was the Enigma, a cipher capable of producing 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible code combinations, and a hulking machine, the Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer, capable of decoding the Enigma."
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What were they thinking!
Actually, 67 bits would have been more than sufficient for a symmetric cipher (which Enigma was), if the algorithm were strong, that is to say, that no successful attack against the cipher could be carried out in less time than a brute force key search attack. In fact, DES uses only a 64 bit key and it was considered good enough for banking purposes well into the 1980's, and certainly could not have been decoded by even the most powerful computers of the World War II era.
The reason Enigma was cracked was t
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And who would have thought it was the Poles that did it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Cipher_Bureau [wikipedia.org]
Thanks for the update Big Ben (Score:4, Insightful)
"computer wannabe" (Score:3)
who the hell wants to be a computer?
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Kraftwerk
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No; they sure loved their computers, but they didn't want to be them. That was Ultravox.
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Whether they wanted to be or not, plenty of men and women were computers during WWII. The machines of the war helped to change the meaning of the word from "A person who makes calculations or computations" to today's exclusive meaning as an electronic computing device.
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Wow, we really have come full circle now. link [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thanks for the update Big Ben (Score:4, Informative)
But, this does give us a chance to recommend the excellent biography of Alan Turing which explains his role in the evolution of computer science and his role in breaking the German cyphers:
"Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges [amazon.com]
unfortunately it's completely wrong (Score:3)
the real 'pioneers of computers' were the Census machines, and the vast bureaucracies like the Social Security Administration.
and yes, even the machines in the Nazi concentration camps, which IBM Germany worked on.
dare i mention that the Soviet Union was a huge punch card customer through the 1930s?
and that punch card machines are, well, basically, like gigantic electromechanical SQL devices?
oh, and the Japanese fascists were pretty good customers too.
ahhh
but of course, lets forget about all that. everyone
Re:unfortunately it's completely wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
industrial control history (Score:2)
very interesting... i wonder what other old machines used punch cards?
the player piano surely can't have been the only thing between the jacquard loom and the Census machine in the 1890s.
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My photographic memory film isn't always loaded, so it's nice to be reminded of this again :)
P.S.
Nerd = derogatory and not necessarily a geek.
Dork = slang for a penis.
Wannabe = someone pretending they know everything and thus so should everybody else.
American Crypto better than Enigma (Score:5, Informative)
In these discussions it is common to overlook Sigaba [wikipedia.org], the American encryption machine that was significantly more secure than Enigma.
Electronic Cipher Machine (ECM) Mark II [maritime.org]
Cryptanalysis of the SIGABA --- 3.4 Stepping Maze [curby.net]
The Germans that beat their heads against it referred to it as, "The big machine".
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Wow, I wish I had mod points. That's way more interesting than TFA. Plus, while everyone with a high school education has probably heard about Enigma, I at least had never heard of Sigaba.
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Thanks for that, I've never heard anything about the American crypto from the 30s or 40s.
Re:American Crypto better than Enigma (Score:4, Insightful)
SIGABA was not that great, in great poverty, post ww2, England was able to tell the US of its workings in 1947 and hinted they had used some of the SIGABA ideas. The US was shocked as they thought they had "made in the USA" crypto perfection. The UK suggested working together on a better system, to cut costs in replacing its own Typex as SIGABA was in the past.
The US said no, then Korea and the NSA changed everything.
The US finally got crypto in the 1950's and its greatest gift to the world has been ensuring all export quality codes and devices used by friends and other nations where well known to the USA.
Re:American Crypto better than Enigma (Score:4, Interesting)
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How interesting!
This morning I got sidetracked into a past code breaking challenge that involved a substitution cipher. [freenode.net]
Sigaba seems like a 1-digit substitution cipher implemented on a complex rotor system.
Um...isn't this NEWS for nerds? (Score:1)
Seriously, how did this get on to the main page. There is no NEWS here...
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Re:Um...isn't this NEWS for nerds? (Score:5, Informative)
Thomas Edison was a really awesome inventor
Thomas A. Edison was a really awesome businessman, opportunist, and quite possibly the world's first patent troll. Very few of the inventions he has been credited for were actually invented by him, the person. Sometimes by employees of Edison, and sometimes these were foreign inventions, bought or outright filched, and then patented in the US by Edison.
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He was just the first successful patent troll. Patent trolling had become all the rage around that time and a lot of 'old money' today was born from little patents here, little patents there, etc.
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I found it interesting that in the history of two of the biggest forms of mass media, recorded sound and cinema, Edison was there at the outset, yet his aggressive pursuit of patent infringement meant that people were forced to look elsewhere and h
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So we can agree that he invented patent trolling?
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So pretty much like Gates and Jobs then?
Re:Um...isn't this NEWS for nerds? (Score:4, Informative)
No, he wasn't. You've fallen for the hype (mostly created by Thos. Edison himself).
Colossus was *not* used to break Enigma (Score:4, Informative)
IIRC Colossus was used to break the Lorenz ciphers, not Enigma. BP were using the Bombs with menus for Enigma.
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Oops, that should have been "bombe" not "bomb". Good info here:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm
Why no Colosson? (Score:1)
Book (Score:2)
For those who want to do a bit more reading on the subject (of the Bombe machines, Colossus, etc.), there's Colussus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret [amazon.com] by P. Gannon.
Enigma emulator on linux (Score:2)
I'm more interrested in an open source command line tool, with decoding abilities.
Connections - Faith in Numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Connections - Episode 4 - "Faith in Numbers" [youtube.com]
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The Connections series is indeed timeless! They need to start making documentaries like that again... with real scientists/historians and not actors reading lines... and the assumption that the audience has an IQ of at least room temperature. Also the production values of that series are still impressive by today's standards. It blows my mind how they seem to have constructed entire elaborate sets with lots of extras and costume, just for these 10 second clips between segments. Just James Burke talking in f
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Ahh... Back when The Learning Channel was actually about learning...
The most fun part (until you've seen an episode already) was trying to guess where it would go next when the next connection was coming in a series. In a way it was like trying to play along with Jeopardy, but in a historical timeline/storyline form. It was also neat when they'd do the jump-back sections with seemingly unrelated stuff in order to do the A+B=C things that they'd occasionally throw in.
I do kind of miss shows like that. They w
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I have no idea why this comment was modded down. I,too, enjoyed TLC before it became the "Paint Your House" channel. James Burke will always be a on a pedestal for me. He had other series and books besides "Connections". Pick up a copy of the "Pinball Effect" and you'll be mesmerized for hours reading and re-reading his prose.
There's still hope for good programming. Unfortunately, it's not coming from network or cable tv. I've setting IPTV. TWIT.TV and Revision3 are highly bookmarked on my system.
Now, how d
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I love those old 80's docos and their huge lapels!
Much better quality than what passes for a lot of docos these days.
Colossus was not used for Enigma (Score:2)
While Colossus may have been capable of breaking Enigma (though it is not sure, as it was a highly specialized computer), it was actually used for breaking another, more sophisticated cipher produced by a Lorenz-made machine connected to a telex machine. When encoding, the telex machine emitted a 5-bit code, which was encrypted using the Lorenz machine. For decoding the process was reversed. This type of traffic was called Fish or Tunny in Bletchley Park.
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It is slightly embarrassing (especially in light of all the "Don't nerds know this already?" traffic upthread) that yours is the first comment I've seen to mention this.
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Yes, the wheels of the Lorenz machine were simulated by some logical circuits made of vacuum tubes. But the book I read on the subject claimed, that the circuits were quite generic (some registers and logical operations), so if wired differently, one could make the computer to perform other combinations of operations. Of course breaking Enigma is quite a complicated matter, so it is entirely possible that Colossus was not flexible enough to be wired to do that.
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Article omits relevant information (Score:2, Informative)
Amazingly the article omits to tell us about Konrad Zuze:
"Konrad Zuse (German pronunciation: [knat tsuz]; 22 June 1910 Berlin – 18 December 1995 Hünfeld near Fulda) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941. He received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964 for the Z3.[1] Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 h
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It goes waaaaaay further back than this... (Score:2)
There is evidence that some of the first computers ever produced existed as far back as 150 BC, A device found in 1901, called the Antikythera mechanism, is a mechanical computing device believed to have been used to chart astronomical positions. It's overall design rivals the complexity of an early mechanical watch.
Another fun item, the japanese Karakuri ningy, or clockwork doll. They are some of the earliest known examples of robotics, going back to the 17th century. The Karakuri ningy was primarily used
Other precursor (Score:2)
Another precursor of computer development is Konrad Zuse [wikimedia.org] and his work on his Z serie of machine (a series of binary floating point computer with increasing programability, reaching peak with the Z3 being Turing complete).
It's interesting because unlike all the precursors mentioned in TFA, it was not some secret monster developed by intelligence services to crack codes, but a publicly available project with practical industrial applications (to ease the massive calculation in some engineering fields).
Antikythera was not a computer (Score:2)
However, its existence asks a big question - did the Roman Empire hold technical progress up for nearly 1500 years? It seems likely that it was the Roman takeover of the Hellenic world that put paid to the skills and thought needed to produce thing
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The Roman empire did *not* hold progress up by 1500 years. The *collapse* of the Roman empire held it up by 1500 years.
A *lot* of technological advance happened under the Romans, and perhaps some of the most obvious examples of it are their feats of construction and architecture. (both of which are practical applications of their advances in mathematics, physics, and chemistry). It's quite telling that aqueducts that they built 2000 years ago are still standing while some buildings less than 100 years old a
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japanese Karakuri ningy, or clockwork doll.
It's "ningyo" not "ningy".
This article is typical mass-media slop (Score:2)
As noted elsewhere, COLOSSUS was not used to break Enigma; it was designed to break the cipher of the Lorenz machine (Geheimschreiber). If the Allies had needed COLOSSUS to break Enigma, the war would have been much longer and bloodier. COLOSSUS was not even operational until February 1944. The Allies had re-broken Enigma in early 1940, by hand methods. They read the main Luftwaffe key (RED) from then until the end of the war. They read the main n
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Just to elaborate a little on your excellent summary, it wasn't the Allies who broke the Enigma ciphers, and it wasn't in 1940. The Polish Cipher bureau first did it in 1932. Then in 1939 they provided techniques and equipment (actual working reverse engineered Enigma machines, the reverse engineering being helped by theft of secrets) to French and British intelligence. Without that singular act, the war would have been longer, and gone worse for the Allies. And it certainly would have been longer and g
Beginning of the computer age? (Score:2)
It's strange that an article with that headline says nothing about the postwar period. So here's what's missing.
In the UK, Colossus was kept secret after the war. But the knowledge gained in its construction was used to develop the first British postwar computers [wikipedia.org](the Manchester Baby, an experimental design, leading to the Ferranti Mk.1 commercial computer). Alan Turing and others who were involved with Colossus worked on the Manchester series.
In the US, ENIAC was commissioned by the Army for ballistics cal
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse [wikipedia.org] is also very interesting in pre/war war Germany and post war Switzerland.
But who wants to read about the first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer (1941)?
Best to stick to Colossus, bombe, Enigma ect
Tommy Flowers (Score:2)
Sadly yet another article that talks about collossus and seems to give all the credit to Alan Turing without mentioning the contribution of Tommy Flowers :(
And Max Newman, and Bill Tutte (Score:2)
COLOSSUS didn't decrypt Enigma (Score:3)
Dodgy Math (Score:2)
The Enigma may have had 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 encodings which were theoretically possible before it was built, but, the actual real Enigma machines had quite a bit less. They had 3 rotors each with 26 positions and those three rotors were chosen (with some specific order) from a larger set of at most 7 (differing numbers depending on when in the war we're talking about and which branch of the German military). In addition, they used up to 2 patch cables. This gives a total number of possible encodi
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They used more than 2 patch cables. 10 cables were supplied with the machine, and as of 1939, 7-10 cables were used. See e.g. here [telenet.be], which arrives at 10^23 practically possible encodings.
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Many of the messages sent between stations using the Enigma had similar sets of characters. For example, messages would end with praise to the fuhrer or start with something related to weather (that's two I can recall). This gave the allies a chance to have a known set of plain text and would greatly limit the problem space.
I actually wrote an Enigma
Turing Machine (Score:2)
The Full Story... (Score:1)
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Probably will never be known. I have - on and off - over time, been cobbling together bits and pieces (some experience, some plagiarism and some wit) to try to make a storyline - hopefully one that kids will find engaging. You can find it here... (http://eclecticplanet.org). I welcome constructive criticism, and some good humours. David DelMonte
it would have been more helpful if I gave the exact link... http://eclecticplanet.org/tech/computer/ [eclecticplanet.org]
Get Married at Bletchly Park (Score:1)
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Don't worry. There are lots of places on the internet for 24 year old basement dwellers to talk about childrens' toys and Japanese childrens' television.
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Actually, cartoons ARE made for kids, i.e. those under 18 (hell, under 12, let's be real here), however, Anime CAN be oriented towards a more mature audiance. No, I dont' mean porn, just more mature. Porn cartoons are Mangas. :)
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Well, you're forgetting insignificant parts where Germans invaded France and the USSR, committing crimes that make every other genocide pale in comparison.
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Really?
Japan's seizure of Manchuria and invasion of China wasn't a provocation? The rape of Nanking? 22 million Chinese civilans killed vs 960,000 Japanese civilians dead makes the allies the villains?
How about the Jews and Gypsies killed by Germany, that's surely the fault of the allies.
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Sure is a good thing those nice Germans didn't target any civilians.
Oh, wait, we're back in the real world here! The sad part is, I'm not even entirely sure you're trolling. The Americans didn't have entirely clean hands in the whole affair. Very few countries have fought a major war without doing some things they've later come to regret, one good reason not to have the damn things. And the internment camps were a travesty, but they pale beside Auschwitz or Birkenau. The majority of Japanese-Americans who w
Re:Allies were the villians in WWII (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, while the poster is clearly trolling with his deliberately lopsided history, the US did put well over 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. These camps, while offering better conditions in most respects, bore far too close a resemblance to concentration camps for anyone with a conscience. look it up [wikipedia.org] is you need to know more.
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He's also right about the US de facto starting the war against Japan. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the US had given Japan an ultimatum which was technically impossible to comply with. Basically, it demanded full and immediate withdrawal of all Japanese forces from Indochina by the end of the year, which was clearly logistically impossible (how long as the US taken to withdraw from Iraq now?). The Japanese interpreted this as war being impossible to avoid, and attacked Perl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, where t
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Whenever this debate kicks off both sides start listing things the other did wrong, but there are two important points that are usually overlooked.
1. All parties did regrettable things. Internment/POW camps, bombing civilian targets with incendiaries and nukes, maltreatment and disregard for human rights and the Geneva Convention, sending soldiers on suicide missions... You can argue that one side was worse than the other, which is certainly true, but the real question is did the situation at the time justi
Re:Allies were the villians in WWII (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, while the poster is clearly trolling with his deliberately lopsided history, the US did put well over 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. These camps, while offering better conditions in most respects, bore far too close a resemblance to concentration camps for anyone with a conscience. look it up [wikipedia.org] is you need to know more.
Have you ever heard of the German American Bund [americainwwii.com]? It was one of several organizations of German Americans in the 1930s-40s. It was a significant pro-Nazi force in the United States. If you watch this video [youtube.com], you will think your eyes are tricking you. But yes, that is the United States, and yes, the giant figure you can see in the back of some of the stages is George Washington. Was the Bund potentially dangerous? How could the government not believe it was a possibility? There were a large number of reports of "Fifth Columnists , such as the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps [wikipedia.org] in Czechoslovakia, and the Selbstschutz [wikipedia.org] in Poland that aided the German invaders. There were similar reports out of Norway, Denmark, and other places.
This is Time magazines description of how things looked in 1940 as the US watched country after country fall to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy and be brutalized in a terrible fashion.
I've heard a report that 60,000 Germans & German Americans were arrested, and apparently at least 10,000 were held in camps. There may have been more. This story doesn't seem to get much attention, and the documents seem to be harder to come by.
As to the Japanese, there were many of them that, like the Germans, also had patriotic organizations tying them to Japan.
From: Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial Ignores Wartime Realities [internmentarchives.com]
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too close a resemblance to concentration camps
Nonsense. Show me the ovens for the cremation of murdered humans and you might have a point. Indeed, I believe the Japanese detainees were regularly fed.
The Japanese internment camps were a gross abuse of power for suspect personal gain, a travesty of civil rights for US citizens, and of very questionable strategic gain. But to give them the moral equivalence of the Nazi-run concentration camps is historical revisionist bs.
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If I wasn't completely sure that you are a lying troll, I would correct your mistake and say you probably meant internment camps
Get a grip on a dictionary. An "internment camp" is the same thing as a "concentration camp", neither requires torture, slave labour, or genocide for the term to be applicable. However both require the prisoners to be selected on the basis of ethincity and/or political persuassion.
Re:Allies were the villians in WWII (Score:5, Insightful)
We called them "Reservations".
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We called them "Reservations".
In Australia, the concentration camps were called "missions" - and run by christian missionaries.
Re:Allies were the villians in WWII (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the case now, but back when the reservations were set up, they were absolutely analogous to concentration camps. Entire civilizations were rounded up and sent on a death march to tiny parcels of low-value land, resulting in obscene high mortality rates. If it were done today, it would rightfully be called ethnic cleansing.
I'm not at all the sort to hate on America -- modern day Americans are in no way responsible for the actions of people living close to two centuries ago. Heck, while I don't know the statistics, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of Americans aren't even descended from the English settlers who were living here back then. But we do need to acknowledge that what was done was wrong.
Goatse (Score:1)
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-99999 (Score:1)
Damn! Mod this fucker to hell
NSFW (Score:1)