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Computing and Technology
A historical look at decrypting the Enigma
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[QUOTE="Vanadium 50, post: 6816097, member: 110252"] Sure, and that's why they went electromechanical. The more modern solution would be to go binary: 26 letters is 5 bits, Toss enough NAND can be implemented in a single tube, so a big enough box of tubes can emulate a rotor. Big enough would be a hundred or hundfreds, not the tens of thousands in the upcoming general purpose computers. However, we're programmed to think in binary, They had DeMorgan's Laws, but were these generally known? Or some bit of obscure and useless mathematics. An alternative might be purpose-built tubes with 26 states, like Nixie tubes have ten. (26 and 10? Sounds like string theory) I understand why that didn't take off - one reason is that Nixie tubes, while invented in the 1930's weren't common until the 1950's. The other is that if you need one new piece of technology, it's easy to make the mental leap and you have a fair probability of success. If you need multiple new developments, this is not the case. Finally, memory would definitely have helped, but at the time people were using tubes and aciustic delay limes. Obviously semiconductor memory was decades away, but why not switched capacitor arrays? I think the issue isn't capacitor technology, it was the interface to the ScA. Vacuum tubes have high impedance, so you need a lot of charhe, and that makes them big, slow, and likely unreliable. I'm imagining these big electrolytics like you see in 1930's vintage radios. One per bit. [/QUOTE]
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A historical look at decrypting the Enigma
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