On Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:59:05 +0100, Eeyore
m wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 06 Sep 2010 03:00:38 +0100, Eeyore
m wrote:


And who broke the 'unbreakable' German Enigma code ?
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

This guy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w

"Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on 25 July 1939, in
Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau revealed its Enigma-decryption
techniques and equipment to representatives of French and British
military intelligence, which had been unable to make any headway
against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would
give the Allies an unprecedented advantage (Ultra) in their ultimately
victorious prosecution of World War II."

Clearly not immediately relevant since it was much later that the German
Enigma code was broken.

How much did he contribute to this ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

It's been rebuilt AIUI btw !

Futher info ......

Construction of a fully-functional replica[11] of a Colossus Mark 2 was
undertaken by a team led by Tony Sale. In spite of the blueprints and
hardware being destroyed, a surprising amount of material survived,
mainly in engineers' notebooks, but a considerable amount of it in the
U.S. The optical tape reader might have posed the biggest problem, but
Dr. Arnold Lynch, its original designer, was able to redesign it to his
own original specification. The reconstruction is on display, in the
historically correct place for Colossus No. 9, at The National Museum of
Computing, in H Block Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

In November 2007, to celebrate the project completion and to mark the
start of a fundraising initiative for The National Museum of Computing,
a Cipher Challenge[12] pitted the rebuilt Colossus against radio
amateurs worldwide in being first to receive and decode three messages
enciphered using the Lorenz SZ42 and transmitted from radio station
DL0HNF in the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum computer museum. The challenge
was easily won by radio amateur Joachim Schüth, who had carefully
prepared[13] for the event and developed his own signal processing and
decrypt code using Ada.[14] The Colossus team were hampered by their
wish to use World War II radio equipment,[15] delaying them by a day
because of poor reception conditions. Nevertheless the victor's 1.4 GHz
laptop, running his own code, took less than a minute to find the
settings for all 12 wheels. The German codebreaker said: "My laptop
digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second—240
times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by that
factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a
remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944."[16]

The Cipher Challenge verified the successful completion of the rebuild
project. "On the strength of today's performance Colossus is as good as
it was six decades ago", commented Tony Sale. "We are delighted to have
produced a fitting tribute to the people who worked at Bletchley Park
and whose brainpower devised these fantastic machines which broke these
ciphers and shortened the war by many months."

( some claim the war was shortened by between 2 and 4 years ) and it was
us BRITISH who did it !


If the British had behaved sensibly, there would have been no war.

John