American Bombe: How the U.S. Shattered the Enigma Code

Presented at The Next HOPE (2010), July 18, 2010, 1 p.m. (60 minutes)

Many people know the story of Alan Turing and his work at Bletchley Park in designing the British bombes, the machines used to crack the German Enigma codes. What most people don’t know is what happened afterward. When the German military added a fourth rotor to the Enigma, a new type of machine was needed in order to crack the codes and keep Allied intelligence out of darkness. These American bombes were the first multifunction computers ever built, and are an important part of the history of modern computing. It’s the incredible, gripping story of an enterprise that rivaled the Manhattan Project in secrecy and complexity, and ultimately led to the first modern digital computer.

Presenters:

• Shalom Silbermintz
  Shalom Silbermintz (Spam) is your average, everyday I.T. ninja. If he's not breaking computers, he is probably watching far too much television for his own good. He is also probably the only person in history to ever pick up a soldering iron by the wrong end (in case you were wondering, that did not end well).

Links:

• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/The Next Hope (2010)/The Next HOPE (2010) - American Bombe - How the U.S. Shattered the Enigma Code.srt (subtitles)
• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/The Next Hope (2010)/The Next HOPE (2010) - American Bombe - How the U.S. Shattered the Enigma Code.mp4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7r9xNwNxho

Similar Presentations:

• HOPE 2020 Virtual Rescheduled / Hacking Enigma: The Real Story of the "Imitation Game" and Alan Turing
• ShmooCon X (2014) / "How I Met Your Mother" or The Brief and Secret History of Bletchley Park and How They Invented Cryptography and the Computer Age
• HOPE Number Six (2006) / The Life and Times of Alan Turing, Father of the Computer