[Cryptography] [Crypto-practicum] An historical document.

[Henry Baker]

At 11:41 AM 9/11/2016, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> I haven't searched the historical documents, but IBM would very
>> likely have made a big deal out of this use of their tabulating
>> equipment.
>
>Yeah.  It is exceedingly likely that Turing saw publicity
>about the Coast Guard Cryptanalysis Group breaking the
>codes of rumrunners and opium rings and traffickers and
>smugglers.  I'm thinking it's very unlikely that he saw a
>breath in the news about them using the IBM tabulating
>equipment to do it.
>
>The whole point here was to make sure that no mention
>of the tabulating devices' use in cryptanalysis was to
>make it into that publicity, and specific mention was made
>of making it clear to IBM that no mention of the use of
>those devices in cryptanalysis was to make it into their
>publicity either.  They were probably allowed to say the
>Coasties were using them, but they weren't to breathe a
>word about what they were using them for.  If asked,
>they'd have to talk about boring office stuff like
>keeping track of billable contractor hours, distribution
>of military mail to all the mobilized personnel, tracking
>distribution of supplies and materiel and purchase orders
>and accounting.  You know, normal things, right?  All
>those other perfectly real logistical challenges where
>their machinery would be useful, which were also
>logistical challenges that their business customers
>could relate to their own uses for the devices.
>
>This is the MIB deciding to keep something confidential,
>not the news story that could have only resulted from
>their failure to do so.

I'm sorry to drag this out, but the point I'm trying
to make is that when a live seed finds itself on
fertile ground, it may germinate into a sequoia.

You couldn't find more fertile soil than Turing's
mind circa 1937; even the merest hint connecting
tabulating machines and coding would have been all
that was required for him to see all of the
possibilities.

Turing would certainly have known about punched
card tabulating machines; I believe that they
were also in use in England (but with round
holes?).  He very likely saw them at Princeton
or during his travels in the U.S.

There were various schemes already in use for
hand sorting edge-punched cards with long thin
steel rods; Knuth covers these schemes in his
books.

Punched paper tapes had already been used for
~50 years for teletypes and stock market tickers.

I worked on these so-called "Electronic Accounting
Machines", which included *sorters*, *mergers* and
*printers*.

Sorters were read-only devices that rearranged the
ordering of the cards.  Mergers (programmed with
wired plug-boards) would merge 2 (or more) decks
of sorted cards and merge the information from
the two (or more) different streams into an
newly punched output stream.  Printers (also
programmed with wired plug-boards) would process
sorted card decks and subtotal certain columns on
a "break", where a high order field in the sort
order would change.

I seem to recall that only the printers were
smart enough to do arithmetic; the mergers could
compare, but I don't recall their ability to
add or subtract (at least in the earlier models).

P.S.  Wouldn't it be a scream to find out that
if Turing *hadn't* seen this Coast Guard publicity,
he might never have been interested in coding and
Britain would have lost the war!

In this particular case, secrecy might have killed
the very technology that would have won the war.

I'm afraid that crypto secrecy -- in general -- set
everyone back far more than it helped.  Look at how
the field exploded once Diffie/Hellman/RSA got
published.