An Enigma Wrapped In a Mystery

My last post talked about an Enigma machine up for auction. But unless you are already a WWII geek (like me), you might not get what is so important about this thing that looks like a weird German typewriter.

Right, who else but WWII geeks are reading this anyway?

Well, I'm going to talk about it anyway.

Enigma was in many ways the last of its kind, the last encryption system from a time when a 'computer' was a woman (or rather a lot of women) in a room with a slide-rule. Enigma was the last great analog cryptography system.

There were many versions of the enigma machine made for business, government, and different branches of the German military in WWII. The British managed to crack every one through the efforts of such brainy types as Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. In the process, they invented the modern digital computer.

From those days on, cryptology became less of a game of cloak-and-dagger, less about the great brains attacking a problem as a matter of pentaflops.