John Luciani wrote: > On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Steve Morss > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> You think those Enigma machines are real? They are pretty historic (and >> probably aren't too many of them). > > I think some of them are real and others are reproductions. The display varies > from year to year. This year's display is the largest that I have seen. > Enigmas are very interesting machines. This summer I had a chance to take a tour of the NSA museum, and they have several, of different configurations. A couple were out in the open for people to type on, so of course I had to encode a few silly things. Rather laborious. They said the standard operating procedure was to have two operators, one typing, the other writing down the cipher text. I can see why.
The thing I enjoyed most was the BOMBE that they had on display (non working). A friend of mine who just happens to be a PhD cryptographer tells me that in addition to the BOMBE, cracking was also helped by: 1) A clear text letter never represents itself in cipher text, 2) All military messages were in a rigid format, 3) they usually started with the politically correct "Heil Hitler" after the fixed date/time/ship/etc preamble, and 4) the operators often chose their dog's name or their girlfriend's name as the code setting word. -dave _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user