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Colin mentioned the legitimate Enigma in the US; there's also one here in
Sydney, Oz, owned by the Powerhouse Museum. At least AFAIK it's a WW2
production machine, not the version that had been manufactured for a few
years prior to the war.
I consider myself fortunate to have attended two lectures at the Museum,
both by Prof. Peter Hilton who worked with Turing at Bletchley. After the
lectures, the Enigma was on display, guarded by a museum attendant wearing
cotton gloves. The machine has the 'steckerboard' so I assume it was genuine
WW2 not the pre-war one. Hilton's lecture was absolutely fascinating, and
he held Turing in the very, very highest regard as to his genius. I was
interested in Colossus (used to decode Enigma's successor, the Geheimschriber
(?sp)) and asked the professor afterwards whether at any time during the war
did they envisage the incredible potential of electronic computers following
the war, and his reply made me smile - yes, both he and Turing did forsee
people using machines to solve non-mathematical problems come peace time - and
he also said he thought machine cryptography would be useful in business!
I hope the machine is found and returned undamaged, so unless it ends up
in some private collection I'm sure there are enough 'ears to the ground'
via mil-veh and the net in general that it would be difficult to keep it
from public scrutiny for very long.
Steve.
steven@phaedra.apana.org.au
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 01 2000 - 05:30:04 PDT