RE: Aaron Bartell's RPG/Java comparison

>The Turing machine guy.  It figures.

>How did folks like that make a living?  :)

The non-Joke answer is:  Winning WW II for the
British.

Not enough folks know, thanks to lingering wartime
secrecy, that the first major computer was very likely not
ENIAC , BRAINIAC and whatever -ACs have historically
competed for the title.

Turing's "Bombe", used to crack the German Enigma
was one of the first practical computers ever built and
probably the first built for a serious purpose.  It may
well be _the_ first if someone could fully reconstruct it
so we'd know what it did and didn't do.  I think it may
have also been called "Ultra" or maybe that was the
name for the whole operation surrounding the Bombe.

They may well have been able to build the Bombe
without Turing, but what is now known suggests that
it rather helped to have someone like him around ;).

For those who have been on Mars the last five or ten years,
we now know that the British's break of the German Enigma
was The Big Edge of the war for the British.  IIRC, Churchill
allowed Coventry to be bombed because he feared
compromising the secret of the Engima Break.  It materially
helped defeat the U Boat menace, among many other
important tasks.  It also told them that various of their
important deceptions were working, which helped
make the decision to do D-Day when it happened.

There's still a lot about it that isn't known -- the British
are trying to reconstruct the Bombe as it was destroyed as
part of cold war paranoia somewhere along the way.  For
all I know, it wasn't a fully programmable computer in
the modern sense.

But, it may well prove to be the first when the dust clears
in a couple of years.



Larry W. Loen  -   Senior Java and AS/400 Performance Analyst
                          Dept HP4, Rochester MN


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