The Machines That Sparked the Beginning of the Computer Age

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."

Thanks for the update Big Ben

[jhoegl]

Seriously, everyone who is a computer geek/nerd/dork/wannabe knows this.

Re:Allies were the villians in WWII

[Trailwalker]

At no point in history has the United States of America run a concentration camp. EVER.

We called them "Reservations".

Re:"computer wannabe"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Allies were the villians in WWII

[artor3]

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.

Re:American Crypto better than Enigma

[AHuxley]

The US had networks of rich trustafarian like elites feeding back news pre ww2 and the US gov liked to read all text flowing via its private telco network ie Room 641A like.
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:unfortunately it's completely wrong

[Conare]

For punch card machines you can go all the way back to the Jaquard Loom [wikipedia.org] in 1801 which used punch cards to set weave patterns. Again, probably 95% of you readers knew this, but no one else had mentioned it yet so...