Image: The Bombe

A Better Mousetrap

About Me

By the beginning of the Second World War the German military and government services had integrated the Enigma encoding machine into its communications. Having been developed and improved over the previous two decades, the Enigma provided sophisticated encryption for radio signals sent between mobile forces and central command. Mathematicians and cryptologists in Poland had been working on deciphering the Enigma-encoded messages for some time, and shared their knowledge with the French and British in 1939. This led to the British adapting the Polish “bomba” machine to create the “bombe” at Bletchley Park.

The Bletchley bombe used a series of spinning drums to simulate Enigma setups in order to attempt to determine the correct settings for a given message. The drums were grouped in sets of three to represent the three rotors on the original Enigma machines. These groups were wired together to test various guesses at the encoding for a message.

For an undergraduate design course I was tasked with improving the realism of a desktop analogue flight simulator, using a KIM-1 microcomputer system. The one-board system featured a 6502 processor, 1K of RAM, and some peripheral interface adapters suitable for taking inputs and driving stepper motors. It was an interesting challenge simulating complex harmonic motion on a machine with only eight-bit addition and subtraction, and have that simulation run fast enough to provide real-time feedback.

I now have a Raspberry PI Pico 2 W, which has a dual-core microprocessor with hardware floating point, 520K RAM, 4MB flash ROM, and on-board WIFI and Bluetooth. The entire board is about the size of the 6502 chip on the KIM-1.

I graduated from Engineering at a time when slide rules were just being replaced by calculators as being acceptable for exam use. I discovered that I had a talent for using computers to solve engineering problems, which led to a career.

I have worked in the IT business for many decades, spanning mainframes to mobile. I have seen a lot of technologies come and go with many reappearing in a different guise. Having witnessed many Silver Bullet ideas fail to fire, I remain optimistic.

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