Enigma-Cracking Bombe Recreated

toxcspdrmn writes "Volunteers at Bletchley Park have recreated a working replica of the electromechanical bombe used to crack the Germans' Enigma encryption. The bombe was designed by Polish cryptologists and refined by Alan Turing and colleagues at Bletchley Park. The replica joins a recreated electronic Colossus — generally considered the first electronic computer. Impressive work when you consider that Winston Churchill ordered the originals to be completely destroyed at the end of WWII."

Comments

Re:Why?

[igb]

I'm not sure it's entirely true, anyway. The claim's always made that the reason the British didn't reveal that they'd broken Enigma (in the way in which the Americans rapidly documented the breaks into Red and Purple as soon as the war was over) was that the British were selling Enigma to misguided European powers, advertising it as the German's finest, without revealing they'd broken into it. For this story to make sense, the British would have to have retained the ability to break into Enigma.

It's always rumoured that Collossi were in service at Cheltenham into the sixties, attacking various Fish-style machine baudot-code ciphers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a bombe or two were kept as well: with the use of the diagonal board, they were probably faster than an emulation in a computer would have been.

ian