Movie

[CINDERS]

Just watched The Imitation Game about Alan Turing and the breaking of the Enigma code I found it pretty good and well worth the watch.
After they broke the code ULTRA was formed and the information used helped shorten the war by 2 years and save @14 million lives.
The Turing machines as they were known morphed into what we call computers today.
It had its last gasp of history in 2013 with Queen Elizabeth which you will have to watch the film to find out what she did.
Enjoy.

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[Paul S.]

Ooh, ooh, I know, I know.

[CINDERS]

Okay Okay here it is!

Just to give you an idea of just how powerful at encrypting the Enigma was and how much of a threat it was to understanding the orders being given out that the allies needed to know.
Here is the answer so you can grasp just what it was they were trying to decipher, for some it would require a very long slide rule and lots of paper and a few centuries of their time!

How many ways are there to link up pairs of letters on the Enigma machine?

The answer is that there are approximately 158,000,000,000,000 - that is, 158 million million - possible combinations of 10 pairs of 26 letters on the plug board. The maths behind this calculation is complex.

The total number of possible ways in which a standard army-issue Enigma machine could be set up was:

\[ 60\times 17,576\times 676\times 150,738,274,937,250, \] which is approximately 158 million million million.

Also just to enlighten what Queen Elizabeth did in 2013 was to quash Alan Turing's conviction of indecency (he was a homosexual and convicted, he was put on chemical castration medication instead of going to jail) he committed suicide in 1954, none of the Bletchley park people were allowed to speak of what they did during the war.
Only now are we beginning to find out what was accomplished by them yes it was a film with the usual Hollywood stuff but it did show just how desperate they were and after cracking it allowing casualties to still happen so the Germans would not know the Enigma had been compromised.

[Gil Boyd]

Cinders,
If only we could go back in time, and drop off an IBM laptop to them it would have saved so much time.
But being serious, when you compare the size of the computer machinery they had which took up three rooms in its physical size, its amazing how quick the computer technology has moved forward since the war. It seemed to go dead until about the early 80's then BOOOM computers and mobile telephony were household.
These clever people cracked it in a few war years.......amazing what they achieved, when you are put under a lot of pressure to save your way of life in England

[Paul S.]

Cinders,
... go back in time, and drop off an IBM laptop ...

It's been mentioned so many times that it has become cliché that the average mobile phone has more computing power than the computers used for the Apollo lunar missions.

That said, I remember being shown the computer in an air traffic en-route control centre in the middle 1970s and being told that it was the biggest, most powerful thing that IBM had built at that time, and that it took up two rooms larger than two basketball courts. It is anybody's guess how much more powerful today's multiple gigabyte laptop. Thanks for that goes to micro-chip technology and all it has brought us.