[10870] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: NCR's Bombe
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rick Smith at Secure Computing)
Mon Jun 17 18:49:53 2002
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 17:01:16 -0500
To: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>,
cryptography@wasabisystems.com
From: Rick Smith at Secure Computing <rick_smith@securecomputing.com>
In-Reply-To: <p05111a44b91e972cc9cb@[66.149.49.6]>
At 10:24 AM 6/1/2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>http://www.activedayton.com/ddn/local/projects/enigma/enigma_index.html
>
>Is a pointer to an eight-article series on NCR's replication of a Bombe to
>break the Enigma.
I looked through the articles and found myself personally intrigued by comments about "Navy cryptographers at MIT" during WWII. This is the first I've heard of such a thing, though I've read a half-dozen books about crypto history. Either that, or I dismissed the comments as allusions to academics who dabbled in it but weren't really keyed into the war effort.
Does anyone have a thumbnail history of WWII crypto at MIT?
The article points at the book "Information and Secrecy" by Colin B. Burke which I hadn't heard about before this. Anyone familiar with that book?
My father had been a naval officer at MIT during the war and stayed with the Navy (computer applications to 'business problems' and shipyards, not codebreaking) afterwards. The story he told was that he worked on radar, and the similarities between microwave circuits and evolving computer circuits had led him to go into computer R&D as the war wound down. After all these years I'm beginning to wonder if there was more to it than that.
Rick.
smith@securecomputing.com roseville, minnesota
"Authentication" in bookstores http://www.smat.us/crypto/
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