[Cryptography] Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
John Newman
jnn at synfin.org
Sat Nov 11 16:30:51 EST 2017
On November 11, 2017 12:24:47 PM EST, John Young <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:
>CODE GIRLS
>The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
>By Liza Mundy
>
>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/books/review/liza-mundy-code-girls-world-war-ii.html
>
>Describes the experiences of several thousand
>American women who spent the war years in
>Washington, untangling the clandestine messages
>sent by the Japanese and German militaries and
>diplomatic corps. At a time when even
>well-educated women were not encouraged to have
>careers much less compete with men to
>demonstrate their mastery of arcane, technical
>skills this hiring frenzy represented a
>dramatic shift. The same social experiment was
>simultaneously unfolding on the other side of the
>Atlantic. The British debutantes and their
>middle-class peers recruited to work at the
>secret Bletchley Park code-breaking operation came to outnumber the
>men.
>
>Mundys narrative turns thrilling as she
>chronicles the eureka moments when the women
>succeed in cracking codes, relying on a mixture
>of mathematical expertise, memorization and occasional leaps of
>intuition. ...
>
>At the end of the war, virtually all of the
>female code breakers were given their walking
>papers and returned to civilian life. Only a few
>superstars were asked to stay on (among them Ann
>Caracristi, who went on to become the first
>female deputy director of the National Security Agency).
>
>For these accomplished and resourceful women, who
>had been given a heady taste of professional
>success, it was jarring to have to fight to be
>accepted to top graduate programs on the G.I.
>Bill or embark on traditional paths as wives and
>mothers. Warned not to reveal their secret
>wartime lives, many remained silent about their
>valuable service. Thanks to Mundys book, which
>deftly conveys both the puzzle-solving
>complexities and the emotion and drama of this era, their stories will
>live on.
I think they made a movie about this recently, Hidden
Figures... Or wait, actually that was about females
acting as "computers" for NASA in it's early days.
Stuff like project venona in it's early pre-computer days
and basically all code breaking before digital computers
always seems like a titanic feat when I think about it.
Early versions of UNIX had no "more" command
because the "terminal" was a fucking piece of paper ;)
We are lucky, at least, that we have reasonable
computer systems these days, even if everything else
is beyond fucked.
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