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t. e. The Enigma machine was used commercially from the early 1920s and was adopted by the militaries and governments of various countries—most famously, Nazi Germany. Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that ...
The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military. The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top ...
Rotor electrical view. The scrambling action of the Enigma rotors shown for two consecutive letters — current is passed through the rotors, around the reflector, and back out through the rotors again. Note: The grayed-out lines represent other possible circuits within each rotor, which are hard-wired to contacts on each rotor.
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 [ 1 ] to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded [ 2 ] as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although ...
Arthur Scherbius, inventor of the Enigma cipher. Arthur Scherbius (30 October 1878 – 13 May 1929) was a German electrical engineer who invented the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. [1] He patented the invention and later sold the machine under the brand name Enigma. Scherbius offered unequalled opportunities and showed the importance of ...
Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ ˈtjʊərɪŋ /; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. [ 5 ] He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation ...
The German Enigma used a combination key to control the operation of the machine: rotor order, which rotors to install, which ring setting for each rotor, which initial setting for each rotor, and the settings of the stecker plugboard. The rotor settings were trigrams (for example, "NJR") to indicate the way the operator was to set the machine.
The left end consisted of electromechanical computing components. The right end included data and program readers, and automatic typewriters. The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was one of the earliest general-purpose electromechanical computers used in the war effort during the last part of World War II.