Hitler's secret coding machine sold on eBay

[webfact]

Hitler's secret coding machine sold on eBay
Henry Bodkin

LONDON: -- Bletchley Park historians have recovered a rare machine used by Adolf Hitler to exchange top secret messages with his high command after finding it advertised on eBay for just 9.50 pounds ($19.30).

Volunteers from the National Museum of Computing, based at the wartime code-breaking centre, tracked down the Lorenz teleprinter to a home in Southend, Essex, where it had been lying forgotten on the floor of a shed. At first the researchers assumed they had bought a civilian version of the machine, but when they discovered a swastika and unique military serial number they realised it was part of the system Hitler used to communicate with commanders such as General Erwin Rommel.

While the Enigma system was used by the German war machine to exchange coded messages with frontline units, the more complicated and cumbersome Lorenz coding system was used to deliver detailed messages exclusively to the eyes of the commanders at static headquarters.

Full story: http://www.smh.com.au/world/hitlers-secret-coding-machine-sold-on-ebay-20160529-gp6t1d


-- Sydney Morning Herald 2016-05-30

[keemapoot]

"The Imitation Game" was a great movie about Enigma, mentioned in the article, and the somewhat true story of Alan Turing, who cracked the code and turned the war during WWII.

It was playing on truevisions a few months ago, and will probably return, but a good movie to download or buy too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Critical_response

[emilymat]

The guys who cracked this code machine never became as famous as,say, Alan Turin who broke Enigma, yet it was more difficult.

I think one was a post office engineer and the other a 25 year old mathematician.

[Thaddeus]

LONDON: -- Bletchley Park historians have recovered a rare machine used by Adolf Hitler to exchange top secret messages with his high command after finding it advertised on eBay for just 9.50 pounds ($19.30).

Rare?

Not really, if they were rare the asking price would be a bit more than a tenner.

(and yes, The Imitation Game is a great movie)

[JetsetBkk]

LONDON: -- Bletchley Park historians have recovered a rare machine used by Adolf Hitler to exchange top secret messages with his high command after finding it advertised on eBay for just 9.50 pounds ($19.30).

Rare?

Not really, if they were rare the asking price would be a bit more than a tenner.

(and yes, The Imitation Game is a great movie)

Maybe the seller didn't know what it was.

[Thaddeus]

LONDON: -- Bletchley Park historians have recovered a rare machine used by Adolf Hitler to exchange top secret messages with his high command after finding it advertised on eBay for just 9.50 pounds ($19.30).

Rare?

Not really, if they were rare the asking price would be a bit more than a tenner.

(and yes, The Imitation Game is a great movie)

Maybe the seller didn't know what it was.

A typewriter with a broken spellcheck?

[elgordo38]

"The Imitation Game" was a great movie about Enigma, mentioned in the article, and the somewhat true story of Alan Turing, who cracked the code and turned the war during WWII.

It was playing on truevisions a few months ago, and will probably return, but a good movie to download or buy too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Critical_response

Yes Cumberpatch at his best.

[HerbalEd]

LONDON: -- Bletchley Park historians have recovered a rare machine used by Adolf Hitler to exchange top secret messages with his high command after finding it advertised on eBay for just 9.50 pounds ($19.30).

Rare?

Not really, if they were rare the asking price would be a bit more than a tenner.

(and yes, The Imitation Game is a great movie)

Actually they are very rare. Obviously the seller didn't know the true value.

[Andaman Al]

The guys who cracked this code machine never became as famous as,say, Alan Turin who broke Enigma, yet it was more difficult.

I think one was a post office engineer and the other a 25 year old mathematician.

But that is the whole point. Alan Turin did not become famous. Nobody was allowed to know what he had done and nobody even knew who he was. After the war he was discarded with the weight of the loss of many allied servicemen on his mind as he was always aware of attacks that were going to take place and the Government did not act on 95% of them because they did not want the Germans to know we had cracked the code. Turin was then persecuted as a homosexual and made to undergo 'electro therapy' to try and 'cure him'. He died in poverty and obscurity, a completely shameful act from the British Government. Turin has only become known and famous since the information on enigma was declassified in recent years.

[A1Str8]

What did that adolf want and why was he struggling remains a mystery.
I mean that guy was funny. he was like a little angry kid trying to find his marbles.
He even had a little coding machine lol. But when both the UK and the US knew exactly, that ww2 was about to start and didnt do anything because it was in their best interest, one wonders why didnt they encrypt that, so that nobody would know. Now the whole world laughs at them.

Edited May 30, 2016 by A1Str8

[lungbing]

Alan Turin was not from Italy! His name was Turing.

He was not prosecuted as a homosexual because because being homosexual was never an offense in British law.

He was prosecuted for the offense of gross indecency.

[Basil B]

The guys who cracked this code machine never became as famous as,say, Alan Turin who broke Enigma, yet it was more difficult.

I think one was a post office engineer and the other a 25 year old mathematician.

Tommy Flowers the Post Office engineer did eventually get recognition but the most upsetting thing was Colossus was broken up and buried at the end of the war to appease the Americans who then claimed to have invented the computer.

Edited May 30, 2016 by Basil B

[singa-traz]

The guys who cracked this code machine never became as famous as,say, Alan Turin who broke Enigma, yet it was more difficult.

I think one was a post office engineer and the other a 25 year old mathematician.

But that is the whole point. Alan Turin did not become famous. Nobody was allowed to know what he had done and nobody even knew who he was. After the war he was discarded with the weight of the loss of many allied servicemen on his mind as he was always aware of attacks that were going to take place and the Government did not act on 95% of them because they did not want the Germans to know we had cracked the code. Turin was then persecuted as a homosexual and made to undergo 'electro therapy' to try and 'cure him'. He died in poverty and obscurity, a completely shameful act from the British Government. Turin has only become known and famous since the information on enigma was declassified in recent years.

Turing was known a bit before the enigma code-breaking secrets were declassified ...

[Grouse]

"The Imitation Game" was a great movie about Enigma, mentioned in the article, and the somewhat true story of Alan Turing, who cracked the code and turned the war during WWII.

It was playing on truevisions a few months ago, and will probably return, but a good movie to download or buy too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Critical_response

Yes, absolutely first class.

A bit too much on the homo stuff and the heroine, but very well played by Cumberbatch

My father was involved in all that. Never told my mother until the 1980s. Best kept secret of all time!

There's a great book called Colossus about breaking Lorenz and the world's first programmable computer. Also recomended.

Turing used the term universal machines. He invented the whole idea of loading in instructions telling the machine what to do and then loading the data in the same way. He was a genius.

Edited May 30, 2016 by Grouse

[Grouse]

Alan Turin was not from Italy! His name was Turing.

He was not prosecuted as a homosexual because because being homosexual was never an offense in British law.

He was prosecuted for the offense of gross indecency.

Homosexuality was indeed illegal. He accepted chemical castration rather than prison. Committed suicide by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. It is said that Steve Jobs got the idea for the Apple logo from that (probably apocryphal though).

Turing was posthumously pardoned by the Queen at the urging of Gordon Brown. He should have a bronze statue. The man invented the programmable computer for gods sake.

[Grouse]

The guys who cracked this code machine never became as famous as,say, Alan Turin who broke Enigma, yet it was more difficult.

I think one was a post office engineer and the other a 25 year old mathematician.

Tommy Flowers the Post Office engineer did eventually get recognition but the most upsetting thing was Colossus was broken up and buried at the end of the war to appease the Americans who then claimed to have invented the computer.

Actually, by the end of tha war there were several colossi. All were ordered destroyed by Churchill to keep the secret in case we needed to do something similar. Actually Turings work was instrumental in getting the first mainframes out of Manchester university and Ferranti. This was the precursor of ICL after English Electric, Lyons and Letchworth joined. Those were the days! 24 bit words! George Ill!

And where is our computer and digital electronics industry now? No investment, no long term approach! What a waste! We have some first class brains in the UK!

(ICL was sold to Fujitsu since you ask)

Edited May 30, 2016 by Grouse

[Grouse]

The guys who cracked this code machine never became as famous as,say, Alan Turin who broke Enigma, yet it was more difficult.

I think one was a post office engineer and the other a 25 year old mathematician.

Tommy Flowers built the hardware (all valves - thousands of them) but the mathematicians designed it.

[Grouse]

Turings inventions were part of the Pandora's box used to try and persuade our cousins to come and help out during the war. We handed over everything including the cavity magnetron (for radar) and a bunch of other stuff.

[Scott]

Off-topic posts and replies removed.

[Andaman Al]

Alan Turin was not from Italy! His name was Turing.

He was not prosecuted as a homosexual because because being homosexual was never an offense in British law.

He was prosecuted for the offense of gross indecency.

Not sure where you are from but you are very wrong. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1967 in England!

From Wiki, read the rest youself

• 1954 Alan Turing, an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist influential in the development of computer science committed suicide. He had been given a course of female hormones (chemical castration) by doctors as an alternative to prison after being prosecuted by the police because of his homosexuality.^[50] The trial ofEdward Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood began on 15 March in the hall of Winchester Castle. All three defendants were convicted. The Sunday Timespublished an article entitled "Law and Hypocrisy" on 28 March that dealt with this trial and its outcome. Soon after, on 10 April, the New Statesman printed an article called "The Police and the Montagu Case". A month after the Montagu trial the Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe agreed to appoint a committee to examine and report on the law covering homosexual offences (this would become known as The Wolfenden report).
• 1956 The Sexual Offences Act recognises the crime of sexual assault between women.^[51]
• 1957 The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Lord Wolfenden) was published. It advised the British Government that homosexuality should not be illegal.^[52]
• 1958 The Homosexual Law Reform Society is founded in the United Kingdom following the Wolfenden report the previous year, to begin a campaign to make homosexuality legal in the UK.^[53]
• 1959 Alan Horsfall, Labour councillor for Nelson, Lancashire, tables a motion to his local Labour party to back the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The motion is rejected, but Horsfall and fellow activist Anthony Grey later form the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee.^[29]

1960s[edit]

• 1963 The Minorities Research Group (MRG) became the UK's first lesbian social and political organisation. They went on to publish their own lesbian magazine called Arena Three.^[51]
• 1964 The North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee was founded, abandoning the medical model of homosexuality as a sickness and calling for its decriminalisation. The first meeting was held in Manchester. The North West branch of the national Homosexual Law Reform Committee became the national Campaign for Homosexual Equality in 1969.^[29]
• 1965 In the House of Lords, Lord Arran proposed the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts (lesbian acts had never been illegal). A UK opinion poll finds that 93% of respondents see homosexuality as a form of illness requiring medical treatment.^[29]

[ozyjon]

"The Imitation Game"

Powerful stuff,

[simon43]

Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1967 in England!

I think the poster meant that being homosexual was never illegal in England, but committing a homosexual act was illegal. In the same way as being a pedophile is not illegal, but committing a pedophile act is illegal. (ie - you cannot regulate what a person thinks, but you can regulate what they do).

Turing was a clever chap. Each year, there is a competition named after him for testing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, where the application tries to fool the human 'testers' into believing that they are actually conversing with another human. Many years ago, (2004), the BBC commented that my own AI program ('Natachata') was the best candidate for passing the Turing test

http://www.ratchetup.com/eyes/2004/03/x.html