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."
Re:American Crypto better than Enigma (Score:4, Interesting)
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]