When Cracking Was Motorised

Being a Prof, I’m so lucky to be invited to meet some amazing people, and see places where some of the great cryptographers of the past once practised their art. One of my favourites is seeing ancient cipher machines, so I’m pleased to say I finished my Enigma Machine [here] and my Lorenz machine [here].

The Birth of Computers

One of the first appearances of computer technology occurred in the USA in the 1880s, and was due to the American Constitution demanding that a survey be undertaken every 10 years. As the population of the USA increased, it took an increasing amount of time to produce the statistics. In fact, it got so bad, that by the 1880s, it looked likely that the 1880 survey would not be complete until 1890.

To overcome this, a government employee named Herman Hollerith devised a machine that accepted punch cards with information on them. These cards allowed an electrical current to pass through a hole when there was a hole present (a ‘true’), and did not conduct a current when it a hole was not present (a ‘false’). This was one of the first uses of binary information, which represents data in a collection of one of two states (such as true or false, or, 0 or 1). Thus, Hollerith used a system which stored the census information with a sequence of binary information.