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The Machines That Sparked the Beginning of the Computer Age

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-beginning dept.

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."

1 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Allies were the villians in WWII by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    There was one "death march", the Trail of Tears, that only affects the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole.

    The only other forced relocations in the history of the United States were General Order No. 11 (1863), the Japanese, German and Italian internments in World War Two and removal of the Aleutian Islanders in World War Two.

    It wasn't just "English settlers" who were living back then, English, German, Dutch, Scottish and Irish.

    My European ancestors got here in 1631 and 1895, my American Indian ancestors got here, oh about 10-45,000 years ago.

    I'm from an Indian Reservation, studied the American Indian Wars in grad school and nothing I've experienced or learned tells me that anything the Americans did to the American Indians was any worse than what the American Indians had done to each other for thousands of years.