<Yes, I suppose, but it also shows that the computers were not the real
<cutting edge,
The programming however was! The MMC had the disk completely wiped and
even the timing tracks were gone.
<like crypto and countermeasures gear. If it were the
<absolute best, cutting edge technology, it would have been shredded
<(literally - I have seen the end results).
That's the point. The crypto and contermeasures stuff it was not the
parts but the general designs that had to be hid. After all we didn't
want it known how to encode or decode a cypher or jam a particular radar
as everyone could do it. Often it was not so much the hardware but the
underlying concepts. With computers the real advances were being made in
the commercial and university spaces as that's the users that pushed for
it or were experimenting with different approaches. If anything the
military was the winner as they got to use it after the fact incorperating
it into their systems.
Generally the loss is that we didn't get to see how Purple or Enigma
worked. But I do have a great article from the late 50s about how
The radar display system was linked to the Sage system.
Allison
Received on Thu Nov 06 1997 - 23:09:07 GMT