Wow ! Was that an Enigma one ? How did it manage to survive ?
I know this is way OT but I can't resist !
Gaston
No - this was a Lorenz machine, type SZ42. SZ is Schlussel-Zusatz, or
cipher attachment and 42 is the model year. Works by taking serial 5-bit
Baudot plain text and then encoding it in parallel by XORing it with two
sets of 5 pseudo-random key streams. Pseudo-random repeat length is 10^19,
or around 10^6 longer than the Enigma. It then serialises the enciphered
data back into Baudot and sends it down a telegraph line to a radio
transmitter. It does the whole shooting match electromechanically - not a
single active device in it! Hats off to Lorenz, this thing is like a Swiss
watch.
There was only 150 units ever made, and because of the cipher security they
were only used for communication between the German High Command and Hitler.
Most of course were destroyed by the Germans, as they were supposed to have
been. However, the Bletchley Park one was used by Field Marshal Kesselring,
who was in charge of Italy initially and was then reassigned to the Western
Front just in time for the Allied Normandy assault. It was captured in
Berlin as Kesselring retreated in disarray.
The huge importance of this machine is that it gave rise directly to the
computer age. Faced with an impossible task of manually breaking the code,
Colossus was invented - a 2500 tube (even more than a 545!!) machine that
could find the Lorenz settings in around 20 minutes if it was possible to do
so. It was a massively parallel special-purpose processor (it looked for
statistically significant correlations in the cipher) that was only beaten
on time by a Pentium PII a few years ago. I guess it was the early
equivalent of a DSP or Codec chip now. By the end of the war there was 10
Colossi at BP, all of which were destroyed on Churchill's orders after the
war. It has, however been rebuilt - if you do a websearch on "Colossus
computer" you'll find a bunch of data on this.
Craig
