9 ms·

The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't see in the movies

128 points by hansmayer 1y ago

jleyank 1y ago
Like the early hackers, he made things. In Flower's case, he made things than enabled hackers (eventually). While theory is important and interesting, actually making sh*t that works moves things forward. Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it. Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were. No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
  - defrost 1y ago
    > all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it. Whereas: The dropping results made Admiral Dönitz suspicious. Although reassured by the Abwehr, the German Foreign Intelligence, that Enigma was unbreakable, he insisted on improving the security of Enigma. On 1 February 1942 the famous Enigma M4 model with four rotors and new key sheets were introduced. ~ https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats.htm https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats.... ~ https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm There were multiple Enigma variations, based on rotor choice pool sizes, number of fittable rotors, time cycles to changing procedures, etc. Some naval enigma variations were broken, others weren't.
    - rawling 1y ago
      > Enigma variations ಠ _ ಠ
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    > Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads. Even one-time pads are subject to the efforts used to counter Enigma, such as so-called gardening. I fully agree that layers are better than a single method like Enigma was many times in practice, which is usually all-or-none with no failsafe, at least until later in the war, when Enigma variants started being used in combination with coded messages and code words on top of the Enigma cipher machines themselves, but those efforts were foiled by the dedication and planning of the gardeners’ known-plaintext attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis) > In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message, typically by performing some action the target is sure to report. It was a term used during World War II at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from low heights, possibly because each sea area around the European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or vegetables. > The technique is claimed to have been most effective against messages produced by the German Navy's Enigma machines. If the Germans had recently swept a particular area for mines, and analysts at Bletchley Park were in need of some cribs, they might (and apparently did on several occasions) request that the area be mined again. This would hopefully evoke encrypted messages from the local command mentioning Minen (German for mines), the location, and perhaps messages also from the headquarters with minesweeping ships to assign to that location, mentioning the same. It worked often enough to try several times.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      I can see gardening working against Enigma alone, or one time pads alone, but not with the two used serially.
      - harshreality 1y ago
        OTPs are not vulnerable to anything except compromise of the OTP itself (the pre-shared keystream).
  - jordanb 1y ago
    Not true. There was some suspicion on the part of both Dönitz and his men (which is why they added a code wheel) but none of the U-boat memoirs published before ultra was declassified mention concerns about enigma except in passing. In contrast they attributed getting attacked after sending in a position report to radio triangulation equipment allies had, called huff-duff. And in most cases huff-duff was the reason they were attacked. Bletchley Park was too slow to provide an actionable attack vector off a position report. Instead ultra was used to route convoys around the u-boats. They experienced ultra as empty ocean they they hoped they would find a convoy. The one exception was the "milk cows". These were resupply subs that were to rendezvous with u-boats in the open ocean. Dönitz would send orders for a rendezvous, bletchley would decrypt and send orders to a "hunter killer" group consisting of an aircraft carrier and destroyers to attract the two subs while resupplying.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      I remember reading that the commanders were very suspicious because every time they rendezvoused with a milk cow, there was Allied equipment waiting for them. Rommel attributed the attacks on his secret convoys to spies.
    - thimkerbell 1y ago
      typo, you did not mean attract
drcongo 1y ago
Pretty sure anyone who knows even a tiny bit of Bletchley Park history is well aware of Tommy Flowers.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Did you ever see them or a character in their role in a movie?
  - ViktorRay 1y ago
    I don’t understand why it matters whether someone was in a movie or not. It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      Art imitates life, except when it doesn’t accurately depict the lived reality and efforts of those who did the work and won the war, in which case it’s arguably closer to myth making. The original author of the James Bond series of books, for example, engaged in this kind of propaganda, arguably with good intentions and positive impact. It’s relevant whether or not they were depicted in a movie because that is the context of this thread, because that is the topic of the fine article itself.
    - Maxatar 1y ago
      Doesn't make much sense to say it doesn't matter and also that it's sad. If it's sad then it matters, if it doesn't matter then it isn't sad.
      - jibal 1y ago
        Read it again ... he didn't say that it doesn't matter.
        aspenmayer 1y ago
mwnorman2 1y ago
Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001 he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just operated on a level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!
- onetimeusename 1y ago
  I took graph theory with a professor who talked about Bill Tutte a lot. A lot of theories were proved by him. You could see his name all over in the index of the back of our textbook. This professor always pointed out that Bill was a chemist too. This is a well known graph theorist who was in awe of him.
charcircuit 1y ago
>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
- vcdimension 1y ago
  The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a lot of money due to owning the company. Being able to own something being built by a lot of people is how its possible. >If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war. I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.
    - vcdimension 1y ago
      Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names. The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.
varispeed 1y ago
British classism is still live and kicking. You can't be achieving things if you were not in Oxbridge circle and don't have a trust fund /s That's said, I wonder how many more forgotten working class heroes we have that powers that be decided to bury. Well done for Guardian writing about this.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  But he did achieve a huge thing, that's the point of the article. So not sure your point is valid. Seems a wild jump to say that because the person working on a project was working class then the government would classify it. Evidence welcome...
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Did you confuse "classism" with "classfying"? You aren't responding to the point made at all. Yes, he achieved a huge thing, but he was "working-class", and not celebrated for it. The comment says the last two things are related.
vlovich123 1y ago
> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing. Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing. The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field. This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.
- Animats 1y ago
  J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley used to be considered the real fathers of computing. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was close to being a stored-program general purpose digital computer, and, eventually, when a memory unit was bolted on, became one. When the Moore School of Electrical Engineering wanted the patent rights to any new work Eckert and Mauchley did, they quit and formed a startup - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That became UNIVAC. The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche. UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines. (Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future. Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines. UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers. [1] https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history/comphistory/computerhistory-background-information/computer-history-remington-rand-punchcard-system/ https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history...
croes 1y ago
> The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain What about the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer from the US or the Zuse Z3 from Germany?
robotresearcher 1y ago
My grandfather worked with Flowers at the Post Office. They worked on many aspects of digital telecoms for the decades after the war, leading to the world's first digital PCM telephone exchange 'Empress' in London around 1968, and System X nationally in 1980. Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent. I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
bsenftner 1y ago
I have to say, the structure of that article is a perfect example of elitist exclusionary literature. Hang on: the introduction is wonderful, accessible language that most people can read. Then, the very first sentence of the actual meat of the article: "On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich." That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.) What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF
- spaqin 1y ago
  And the article hasn't yielded the style all the way to the end. It was not fun to read with English being my second language; but I think now that's expected of The Guardian - little information spread out extensively with flowery language.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.
- andrepd 1y ago
  I'd say it's more a failure of the educational system if 99% of people cannot interpret a sentence like that.
  - fart-fart-FART 1y ago
    most people who click a random article from an unknown author don't sign up to read an essay worth of purple prose to get the (actually tiny amount of) useful information teased in the headline. the OP is right - (virtually) no one is reading all that shit.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
LLMs are great at stripping propaganda out of articles like this. Tommy Flowers created Colossus. Alan Turing created Bombe. Colossus was classified for a long time. Bombe was not. Turing ends up being well known, Flowers not. Both men were humble and didn't make a big deal out their work. To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention. Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised. Edited: Bombe not Enigma.
- Leynos 1y ago
  That should read "Turing created the Bombe" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
  - defrost 1y ago
    or even; Turing modified the Bomba design, created by Rejewski, later incorporating significant refinements from W.G.Welchman and Max Newman, relying upon Harold Keen for the engineering design and construction.
  - t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
    Ah yes, thanks
- mangamadaiyan 1y ago
  After reading this post, I fear that LLMs and their ilk will make humans terrible at reading and comprehension, and impair their ability to think, much as how the advent of a car-first society resulted in many humans following a sedentary lifestyle to the detriment of their health.
  - t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
    Great, but why? For some things I want to think, but for some things I want the information with subjectivity taken out of it. I think it depends on intention. For newspapers and other sources with known biases, I think there's value. As with many things, information rarely exists in a vacuum. In this case if we don't think with intention about the framing of such an article, then we've already outsourced part of our thinking to the authors who intend to shape it.

128 points by hansmayer 1y ago

Like the early hackers, he made things. In Flower's case, he made things than enabled hackers (eventually). While theory is important and interesting, actually making sh*t that works moves things forward. Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.

WalterBright 1y ago
The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it. Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were. No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
- defrost 1y ago
  > all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it. Whereas: The dropping results made Admiral Dönitz suspicious. Although reassured by the Abwehr, the German Foreign Intelligence, that Enigma was unbreakable, he insisted on improving the security of Enigma. On 1 February 1942 the famous Enigma M4 model with four rotors and new key sheets were introduced. ~ https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats.htm https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/en/enigmauboats.... ~ https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm https://uboat.net/technical/enigma_ciphers.htm There were multiple Enigma variations, based on rotor choice pool sizes, number of fittable rotors, time cycles to changing procedures, etc. Some naval enigma variations were broken, others weren't.
  - rawling 1y ago
    > Enigma variations ಠ _ ಠ
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  > Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads. Even one-time pads are subject to the efforts used to counter Enigma, such as so-called gardening. I fully agree that layers are better than a single method like Enigma was many times in practice, which is usually all-or-none with no failsafe, at least until later in the war, when Enigma variants started being used in combination with coded messages and code words on top of the Enigma cipher machines themselves, but those efforts were foiled by the dedication and planning of the gardeners’ known-plaintext attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis) > In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message, typically by performing some action the target is sure to report. It was a term used during World War II at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from low heights, possibly because each sea area around the European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or vegetables. > The technique is claimed to have been most effective against messages produced by the German Navy's Enigma machines. If the Germans had recently swept a particular area for mines, and analysts at Bletchley Park were in need of some cribs, they might (and apparently did on several occasions) request that the area be mined again. This would hopefully evoke encrypted messages from the local command mentioning Minen (German for mines), the location, and perhaps messages also from the headquarters with minesweeping ships to assign to that location, mentioning the same. It worked often enough to try several times.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    I can see gardening working against Enigma alone, or one time pads alone, but not with the two used serially.
    - harshreality 1y ago
      OTPs are not vulnerable to anything except compromise of the OTP itself (the pre-shared keystream).
- jordanb 1y ago
  Not true. There was some suspicion on the part of both Dönitz and his men (which is why they added a code wheel) but none of the U-boat memoirs published before ultra was declassified mention concerns about enigma except in passing. In contrast they attributed getting attacked after sending in a position report to radio triangulation equipment allies had, called huff-duff. And in most cases huff-duff was the reason they were attacked. Bletchley Park was too slow to provide an actionable attack vector off a position report. Instead ultra was used to route convoys around the u-boats. They experienced ultra as empty ocean they they hoped they would find a convoy. The one exception was the "milk cows". These were resupply subs that were to rendezvous with u-boats in the open ocean. Dönitz would send orders for a rendezvous, bletchley would decrypt and send orders to a "hunter killer" group consisting of an aircraft carrier and destroyers to attract the two subs while resupplying.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    I remember reading that the commanders were very suspicious because every time they rendezvoused with a milk cow, there was Allied equipment waiting for them. Rommel attributed the attacks on his secret convoys to spies.
  - thimkerbell 1y ago
    typo, you did not mean attract

drcongo 1y ago

Pretty sure anyone who knows even a tiny bit of Bletchley Park history is well aware of Tommy Flowers.

aspenmayer 1y ago
Did you ever see them or a character in their role in a movie?
- ViktorRay 1y ago
  I don’t understand why it matters whether someone was in a movie or not. It’s a sad commentary on western culture that being in a movie seemingly has the importance that it seems to.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Art imitates life, except when it doesn’t accurately depict the lived reality and efforts of those who did the work and won the war, in which case it’s arguably closer to myth making. The original author of the James Bond series of books, for example, engaged in this kind of propaganda, arguably with good intentions and positive impact. It’s relevant whether or not they were depicted in a movie because that is the context of this thread, because that is the topic of the fine article itself.
  - Maxatar 1y ago
    Doesn't make much sense to say it doesn't matter and also that it's sad. If it's sad then it matters, if it doesn't matter then it isn't sad.
    - jibal 1y ago
      Read it again ... he didn't say that it doesn't matter.
      - aspenmayer 1y ago

mwnorman2 1y ago

Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001 he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just operated on a level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!

onetimeusename 1y ago
I took graph theory with a professor who talked about Bill Tutte a lot. A lot of theories were proved by him. You could see his name all over in the index of the back of our textbook. This professor always pointed out that Bill was a chemist too. This is a well known graph theorist who was in awe of him.

charcircuit 1y ago

>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."

vcdimension 1y ago
The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a lot of money due to owning the company. Being able to own something being built by a lot of people is how its possible. >If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war. I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.
  - vcdimension 1y ago
    Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names. The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.

varispeed 1y ago

British classism is still live and kicking. You can't be achieving things if you were not in Oxbridge circle and don't have a trust fund /s That's said, I wonder how many more forgotten working class heroes we have that powers that be decided to bury. Well done for Guardian writing about this.

t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
But he did achieve a huge thing, that's the point of the article. So not sure your point is valid. Seems a wild jump to say that because the person working on a project was working class then the government would classify it. Evidence welcome...
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Did you confuse "classism" with "classfying"? You aren't responding to the point made at all. Yes, he achieved a huge thing, but he was "working-class", and not celebrated for it. The comment says the last two things are related.

vlovich123 1y ago

> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing. Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing. The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field. This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.

Animats 1y ago
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley used to be considered the real fathers of computing. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was close to being a stored-program general purpose digital computer, and, eventually, when a memory unit was bolted on, became one. When the Moore School of Electrical Engineering wanted the patent rights to any new work Eckert and Mauchley did, they quit and formed a startup - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That became UNIVAC. The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche. UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines. (Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future. Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines. UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers. [1] https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history/comphistory/computerhistory-background-information/computer-history-remington-rand-punchcard-system/ https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history...

croes 1y ago

> The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain What about the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer from the US or the Zuse Z3 from Germany?

robotresearcher 1y ago

My grandfather worked with Flowers at the Post Office. They worked on many aspects of digital telecoms for the decades after the war, leading to the world's first digital PCM telephone exchange 'Empress' in London around 1968, and System X nationally in 1980. Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent. I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.

bsenftner 1y ago

I have to say, the structure of that article is a perfect example of elitist exclusionary literature. Hang on: the introduction is wonderful, accessible language that most people can read. Then, the very first sentence of the actual meat of the article: "On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich." That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.) What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF

spaqin 1y ago
And the article hasn't yielded the style all the way to the end. It was not fun to read with English being my second language; but I think now that's expected of The Guardian - little information spread out extensively with flowery language.
anigbrowl 1y ago
If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.
andrepd 1y ago
I'd say it's more a failure of the educational system if 99% of people cannot interpret a sentence like that.
- fart-fart-FART 1y ago
  most people who click a random article from an unknown author don't sign up to read an essay worth of purple prose to get the (actually tiny amount of) useful information teased in the headline. the OP is right - (virtually) no one is reading all that shit.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago

LLMs are great at stripping propaganda out of articles like this. Tommy Flowers created Colossus. Alan Turing created Bombe. Colossus was classified for a long time. Bombe was not. Turing ends up being well known, Flowers not. Both men were humble and didn't make a big deal out their work. To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention. Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised. Edited: Bombe not Enigma.

Leynos 1y ago
That should read "Turing created the Bombe" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
- defrost 1y ago
  or even; Turing modified the Bomba design, created by Rejewski, later incorporating significant refinements from W.G.Welchman and Max Newman, relying upon Harold Keen for the engineering design and construction.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  Ah yes, thanks
mangamadaiyan 1y ago
After reading this post, I fear that LLMs and their ilk will make humans terrible at reading and comprehension, and impair their ability to think, much as how the advent of a car-first society resulted in many humans following a sedentary lifestyle to the detriment of their health.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  Great, but why? For some things I want to think, but for some things I want the information with subjectivity taken out of it. I think it depends on intention. For newspapers and other sources with known biases, I think there's value. As with many things, information rarely exists in a vacuum. In this case if we don't think with intention about the framing of such an article, then we've already outsourced part of our thinking to the authors who intend to shape it.