"AL A." wrote in message
...
I saw a guy with several Enigma machines, complete with manuals, for sale at
a ham radio flea market in New Hampshire last fall.
He wanted 10 or 12 K for each, if I remember correctly. He was also selling
copies of the manuals on CD, with english translation.

$12K is a common price. They are occasionally on eBay. We tracked 2
there a couple of months back.


"Peter Reilley" wrote:
I am told that Enigma machines are relatively common.

Yeah, something like 100,000 to 200,000 where made.
One was sold to the US Army in 1928/9 for $250 for evaluation purposes,
and the US said thats, but no thanks.

After the war
the Allies kept secret the fact that the Enigma code had been cracked.

Until about 1974-75.

The companies that made the original Enigmas kept on making them.

Not quite the original companies.
Well the Swiss made and used them up to 1990.
There is a nice crypto web site based at CERN.

Rotor machines are still in use to this day. I think.
They are elegant simple little mechnical devices which should not be
discounted. They are probably still used in ballistic missile subs (an x-ray
of an older rotor (note: 36-pads)) in Keith Melton's spy book under the John
Walker case.

They were mostly sold to third world countries and used for their secure
governmental and military communication. Some 30 years after the war,
it was revealed that the Enigmas were cracked. All those governments
stopped using them. That is the origin of most of the available
Not quite.
machines. They are authentic Enigma machines, there were not
used by the Germans in the war however.

Cracking isn't a simple process that novices do.


Jeff Wisnia write:
IIRC the Enigma was a German adaptation of a Swiss or Scandinavian code
machine originally intended to safeguard commercial information sent by
telegram.
Is my recollection correct?

Roughly.
The Swiss machines are basically copies.

Rotor machines/cyphers came into existence basically independently in 3
places in the world at about the same time after WWI: the US, Holland
and Scandinavia. Hagelin, Scherbius, and what's his name.

Part of the idea behind the machine is that the machine can fall into an
opponent's hands, but you don't lose security. Didn't have enough peer review.
You need to have a cryptographic discipline, and that was a contributing
part of the problem when for the so called rigid Prussian discipline (not).

"Peter Reilley" wrote:
Yes, that is correct. The inventor even patented the machine so the
internal workings were known to all sides. The Germans did modify
the design to make it more secure.

Well.....
It was intended as business machine.
They patented it to get royalities.
The Germans modified it in a number of ways.
1) a version used the German 29-character alphabet (early navy).
This is nothing to do with security. How many Americans know that
Germans use 29 letters? What was that joke about bi- and tri-lingual?
2) The German army not liking 3 rotor security added a plug board to
transpose selected pairs of letters. This added a false sense of
security and added little real security as code theory later proved.
3) Doernitz added a 4th rotor for his u-boats. 5 rotor versions also
existed. And also non-Engima rotor machines.
4) other variations.

In the early 1930's a German working for the German government
approached the French intelligence service and offered all sorts
of information. Part of the information was the operations manual
for the Enigma machine. The French offered the information to the
English. The English refused. It was the usual French - English
distrust. The French then offered it to the Poles. The Poles took
it and ran with it. The Poles distrusted the Germans. The Poles
invented the Bombe's as a result.

The manual doesn't do a lot for you.
Actually the French did work with the English.
At Bletchley there is a whole galley of stuff devoted to give the Poles
Zygalski, Rejewski, and what's his name credit. They could have simply
cross the Atlantic and borrowed the US Army's.

I just recently saw a photo of one of the Polish reproductions of Engimas.
Regular Engimas have a German QWERT (Z) keyboard. The Polish
reproduction has an ABCDE keyboard sort of like a French Minitel (no
relation, there were both merely being logical, actually lexical).

It's not all mechnical. Some of it was done (my hat off to Zygalski)
with sheets of paper with holes in them. Quite brilliant process of
elimination. The Poles unlike the English or French didn't know that it
could not be done. Before you feel smug about experts being wrong;
it's because the Poles were mathematicians whereas the English and
French were in large part traditional linguists and cryptanalysts.
The guy who headed BP, and one of the guys who had a nervous breakdown,
realized that cryptanalysts who were mathematicians were taking over.
This changed the field forever.

The identity of the German spy has never been revealed.

Schmidt.


Charles Morrill wrote:
According to "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, the identity of

Nice book. Met Singh at Keplers in Menlo Park. Unemployed physicist.

For another great read try Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon," a
fictional story concerning the adventures of a technically inclined
codebreaking family over 50 years. Stepenson writes for people who
enjoy knowing how things work.

I took the Cryptonomicon (only 2/3 done) with me on my first trip to
England. I was in email contact with Neal at the time. And as I was
getting on the train at Easton, I happened by chance to be reading the
section about Euston. Weird. Coincidence.

Good Turing site:
http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

Doubly.

Alan Turing is a figure of haunting genius. I sometimes wonder if
silicon valley might have happened in England had he lived. The US had
so many of the pieces that would lead to mass production of the digital
computer, but still... Turing's homosexuality became public knowledge
and his security clearance revoked after he he had revealed his
homosexuality to police during a burglary complaint.
Turing later committed suicide. As I remember, the British
government apologized many years later.

It would have, no question.
At the same time in Poland moving across Germany, through England were
the Hungarians Teller, von Neumann, and others. Turing and co were
peripheral. We build von Neumann architecture machines these days not
Turing architecture (he was one stepping stone). And thermonuclear work
was as much a driver as cryptanalysis (every one should presume that at
some time some one from NSA/GCHQ will come upon this thread).

The sad thing about Turing for me was that I think he had an out
which would have worked for both the UK and US. I spoke with a couple
of colleagues who knew him. Here, in the Valley, one can meet McCarthy
who did LISP, and I know and correspond with Minsky (before email even).
McCarthy hangs out in rec.arts.books, attends r.a.b.fests, I see him at
local bookstores and in elevators at Stanford in Gates hall.

Speaking with some of Turing's English colleagues, Turing could have been
allowed to immigrate to the Castro in San Francisco (it was known gay
back then before the term existed). GCCS/GCHQ wuold have made an
arrangement with NSA and FBI to watch him. Turing could have been a
professor at Berkeley, and might, had he found a partner be alive to
this day so long as he survived the 80s and AIDS. The whole landscape
of the computer world could have changed were he have been able to talk to
others (some of his ideas had to be declared **** so that he could have
gone on to refine them). And that's the thing which is sad.
For a student to miss the opportunity to have visited him in his office
hour (he could have still consulted to NSA/GCHQ) and called him on his
ideas. And it just simply never occurred to any one over the decades.

Marv Soloff wrote:
Koch, 49, of Delft Holland. In 1927 he assigned the patent to a German,
Arthur Scherbius. Scherbius built a mechanical monstrosity in 1923
called the Enigma A and, with investors, founded Chiffiermaschinen
Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corp). The company was dissolved in
1934 without having any commercial success. The assets were transferred

Scherbius died poor about 28/29 when he was run over by a cart loaded with
machines. They were refined into the elegant little machines that they are.


steamer wrote:
-- the Enigma machine: I've often thought this would be a kewl
project to model in some scale other than 1:1. Might be a chance for
Model Engineer to stretch beyond endless articles on locomotives... :-)

It has been done a number of times.
If you locate the CERN web site, you can play with it in Java.


--According to my sources even before the current hysteria it was
very, very illegal to take one of these machines across a U.S. border.

Merely illegal WITHOUT the appropriate export control paperwork;
it's because of a 1930 munitions act which, what's his
name who wrote The American Black Chamber, Yardley.
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
Sec. of State Henry Stimson
who fired Yardley

So fill our your paperwork.

The Fort, when I had to deal with ours (below) asked for photos of it
and all accomplanying rotors. They wanted serial numbers.
I usually shoot with slide film, I had to make prints.
So I went to th 1-hour photo place in Mountain View, and the, I think
Vietnamese guy behind the counter said: Ah! cryptologic device?
And I was wondering who this photo guy was.

Again, they will read this.
Most people here, including Ed and myself, just civilians.
We are of no, or at most limited interest to them.

I got to see a borrowed one (on its way to a conference) close-up and
there's nothing in there that couldn't be duplicated in a home shop with a
little ingenuity. Finding dimensioned drawings, now, *that* would be a
feat! :-)

Been done.

It's nothing exotic.
First off the German's called a Lamp-box.
It's a keyboard of switches, a battery, and 26 lights with corresponding
windows with letters. It's electrical, it's not electronic.
It contains no logic.

Reader BTW: Blame steamer. He had me come in to be a "cleaner."
That's me Victor the Cleaner.



Marv Soloff ) wrote:
Better to concentrate on the Hagelin rotor machine known by the US
military as the M-209 Converter. Hundreds of thousands of these were made,

Oh yeah, I just saw one of these again (the Museum has them) at the RSA
conference (2 Enigmas there). Easier to make, less security,
small parts (harder to make).