The Machines That Sparked the Beginning of the Computer Age

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."

Comments

Re:American Crypto better than Enigma

[ortholattice]

One of the oddest things I saw in the Wikipedia article was "SIGABA is described in U.S. Patent 6,175,625, filed in 1944 but not issued until 2001". I wonder if that is some kind of record.

Re:Allies were the villians in WWII

[cold fjord]

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 is you need to know more.

Have you ever heard of the German American Bund? 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, 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 in Czechoslovakia, and the Selbstschutz 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.

WAR & PEACE: Science of Treason - Monday, Aug. 26, 1940
> The German-American Bund,* with 71 units strategically located in industrial centres or near munitions works, with 25,000 drilled and disciplined members, is only the most widely publicized of Hitler's U. S. supporters. There are in addition 10,000 other Hitler-heiling Germans in the U. S.; 400,000 Germans who support Hitler but keep quiet about it. There are lecturers, writers, organizers, technical experts, economists, historians. A German professor of history at the University of Hawaii has contributed articles on the U. S. Navy to the Nazi magazine Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, to which professors of the University of California and of Miami University in Ohio also contributed.

> There are some 200,000 Italian fascists in the U. S.

> Not counting fellow travelers, there are 100,000 U. S. Communists who are now actively collaborating with Nazis and Italian fascists, and who are more strategically placed than either in U. S. industry and trade unions. **

> With native-born fascists included, the fifth column numbers more than a million. The main task of cleaning it out is a job for the FBI; laymen can take little direct action beyond reporting suspicious behavior to the Government. But every citizen can contribute to a change in the national atmosphere—"not of lethargy, not of fear, not of defeat, but invigorated by the defiant faith which we have known in the past as typically American."

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

Before the war many thousands of Japanese Americans and Japanese citizens living in the U.S. belonged to militant and patriotic organizations such as the Imperial Comradeship Society and the Japanese Military