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It's hard to overstate how much of advantage the computers in Bletchley Park gave the allies in WWII. At least bump the Computer Age back one year so you can g
by labster 6y ago
It's hard to overstate how much of advantage the computers in Bletchley Park gave the allies in WWII. At least bump the Computer Age back one year so you can get D-Day in there.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoIt seems to me that “military history” in this case is like a 30-year preview of the Computer Age: maybe I’m just young, but I’d generally put the start of the Computer Age around the time of the invention of FORTRAN and Lisp. To my mind, everything before was a “beta”.
- Animats 6y agoBletchley Park did not have general-purpose computers as we understand them. They had special-purpose hardware key-testers - the electromechanical bombe, and the electronic Colossus. Their successor today is a Bitcoin miner. Although it gets less publicity today, Friedman's cryptanalysis operation in the US did much more number-crunching. Friedman turned cryptanalysis from guessing and testing into a statistical problem.[1] He and his organizations made heavy use of modified IBM tabulators during WWII.[2] Those were much more general purpose machines, somewhat programmable. [1] https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents/publications/FOLDER_231/41760429079956.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla... [2] p. 183ff, https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents/publications/ACC15281/41785109082412.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...