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This was arguably the world's first electronic programmable computer. It used a form of frequency analysis looking at the frequency of the differences between c

This was arguably the world's first electronic programmable computer. It used a form of frequency analysis looking at the frequency of the differences between characters rather than the frequency of the characters themselves. The ingenuity required to crack the code without seeing the actual encryption machine and then to build one of the first electronic computers ever made in order to automate it is almost unimaginable to me.

Animats 3y ago
It's one of those special purpose devices that predated the stored-program general purpose electronic automatic digital computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner, not a general-purpose machine. It belongs to the era of "if only we had a good memory device". Eckert, at Columbia University, had been wiring together compute elements from IBM tabulators from the 1930s onward to get basic automatic computation. He went on to develop the UNIVAC I in the 1950s. But things were kind of stuck on stored-program computing until somebody developed a useful memory device in which to store the program. Delay lines and Williams tubes were the first successes. - Automatic electronic digital computer, but not general purpose or stored program - Colossus. - General purpose automatic digital computer, but not stored program or electronic - Harvard Mark I, - General-purpose electronic automatic digital computer, but not stored-program - ENIAC. - Automatic general-purpose computer, but not digital or stored program - Bush Differential Analyzer. There were many other special-purpose machines from that era that never quite made it to the general purpose computer stage. Teleregister [1] made special purpose systems for railroads, airlines, and the military. [1] http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/teleregister.specialpurposesystems.1956.102646324.pdf http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/teleregister.spe...

Animats 3y ago

It's one of those special purpose devices that predated the stored-program general purpose electronic automatic digital computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner, not a general-purpose machine. It belongs to the era of "if only we had a good memory device". Eckert, at Columbia University, had been wiring together compute elements from IBM tabulators from the 1930s onward to get basic automatic computation. He went on to develop the UNIVAC I in the 1950s. But things were kind of stuck on stored-program computing until somebody developed a useful memory device in which to store the program. Delay lines and Williams tubes were the first successes. - Automatic electronic digital computer, but not general purpose or stored program - Colossus. - General purpose automatic digital computer, but not stored program or electronic - Harvard Mark I, - General-purpose electronic automatic digital computer, but not stored-program - ENIAC. - Automatic general-purpose computer, but not digital or stored program - Bush Differential Analyzer. There were many other special-purpose machines from that era that never quite made it to the general purpose computer stage. Teleregister [1] made special purpose systems for railroads, airlines, and the military. [1] http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/teleregister.specialpurposesystems.1956.102646324.pdf http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/teleregister.spe...