[3626] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
[aaa-list] Tommy Flowers, Engineer who cracked German communications, dead, at, 92
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Clive D.W. Feather)
Thu Nov 12 14:39:03 1998
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:31:14 +0000
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive@on-the-train.demon.co.uk>
Reply-To: "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive@demon.net>
In-Reply-To: <3648E0AE.DDB4A1A9@sympatico.ca>
In article <3648E0AE.DDB4A1A9@sympatico.ca>, Sandy Harris
<sandy.harris@sympatico.ca> writes
>> If this refers to the ENIGMA codes used by the germans, im curious.
>> According to my material, it was a swedish mathematician who was first to
>> break the ENIGMA ciphers.
>The original Enigma was a commercial product released in the 1920's. The
>German military adopted it later. By wartime, their navy had its own
>stronger version. I think the Army & Luftwaffe used the same version &
>that it was different from the commercial version, but I'm not certain.
Commercial Enigma didn't have a plugboard; I think that it also didn't
have changeable rotors, though I might be wrong there. The original
Polish Bombe was designed to handle 3 interchangeable rotors and a
plugboard with 2 or 3 cables in it, but not the set of 5 rotors and any
number of cables that Bletchley's Bombes could.
>They built two generations of cracking engine specifically for Enigma.
>Flowers was the main designer of Collosus, the second one.
No: Colossus was to break the 12 rotor teletype code (Tunny, I think -
my sources are not to hand), not Enigma.
--
Clive D.W. Feather | Regulation Officer, LINX | Work: <clive@linx.org>
Tel: +44 1733 705000 | (on secondment from | Home: <cdwf@i.am>
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