Today on this ol' server

Station X

I was surprised at how heavy the keys were. I was at Station X in Brittan, or better know as Bletchley park. It was 2001 and I was hitting the keys on an old WWII German enigma machine. Think of the keys on an old ibm selectra, but heavier. The plug board lit up when I hit a key. There was a buzzing sound as the light was lit. Next I tumbled the rotors. Latch, catch, tick, tick . . .

One of the rare finds in computing history lore and legend is Bletchley Park. This is where Alan Turing worked after writing "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" which introduced the Turing machine. During WWII all communications required deciphering were processed at Bletchley Park. They needed speed, lives were at stake. They needed accuracy. The perfect job for a machine, only there wasn't one. Yet.
The very man who had conceived entirely original rigorous way to determine if it was possible that any type of logical statement (that can be broken up in to mathematical grammar) would complete, needed an automated way to decrypt non-trival codes. He worked on a team to devise ways to automate the cracking. After building the Bombe the team realized a need for the machine to be able to be reprogrammed, akin to how a modern computer operating system can run more than one program. The Colossus is considered one of the worlds first programmable computers. Similar to a modern computer program the Colossus was a reprogrammable machine that would do use algorithms to decipher the messages.

The Park recently finished building a replica of the Colossus. Last year the Park had a contest to see if a developer could beat the newly rebuild Colossus. (All the machines and plans were destroyed shortly after WWII ended. Except that our NSA kept a copy of one of the plans for the Bombe and Colossus. That story is a great vignette in and of itself.)

Now we have computers in phones, cars, vacuum cleaners, in addition to the tradition servers living in datacenters. We even have self-healing features where software will recover from a set of defined hardware and software errors.

On a more somber note, last Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of Turing's death. I think if Turing were a live to day I'd like to think he'd be proud at how far we come. I'd like to think that if he visited our time he'd see amazing cities, vibrant communities, as well as places and attitudes that have far transcended his 50s Brittan. I'd hope he'd be pleased with our efforts to continually push the envelope. I'd hope we'd understand that we need to move past just tolerating people that are different to acceptance. The world lost a great mind for the pettiness of not be able to accept one different from ourselves over some superficial trait.

Posted at 12:41AM Jun 09, 2008 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]