Re: The Macintosh is a girl's computer!

J. J. Lodder <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Wayne Stuart <me4@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

T i m <news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Don A.Gomez" <spartan_isle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So better throw away this gender-bending system
and buy a real man's computer, a Windows PC !!!

Nearly, real men build their own PC's and always have done. Talking of
that, I've just got my external eSATA enclosure so I can now fit my
260G SATA drive in there and stick Vista on it[1], PC's can boot from
external drives as well of course .. ;-)

Nah! Only nancy men assemble PCs from pre-built components. *Real* men
*built* their computers from resisters, capacitors, and ICs.

No, real men built their computers from components they have made, as
you've said - they make their own resistors, capacitors, inductors, and
thermionic valves. Purchased components, along with transistors and
ICs, are for poofs and women.

Nonsense again.

Well, yes, that was the point, wasn't it?

Allan Turing built his own electronics, using vacuum tubes,

Did he? Where do you get that idea from? It's not one I've heard
before now.

with all components hanging free in the air.

Oh, so he built an anti-gravity machine first, did he? Now you're being
sillier than usual. The components were of course mounted on metal
shelves fastened to free-standing steel racks - standard GPO racks, as
it happens.

They had one of these racks - depopulated - from `one of the very early
Manchester computers' on display when I was at university. Bloody heavy
lump of ironmongery.

He never turned off the power while working.
According to legend bystanders
had learned to tell from his ouch or auch
whether he had accidentally touched the high voltage
or the soldering iron while soldering in yet another socket.

Hmm. I know he designed stuff, but did he *really* modify hardware with
his own hands? I get the idea he was one of those who shouldn't have.
Mind you, there were plenty of people who were dabbling with electronics
back then who were an absolutely bloody liability when it came to
practical work.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Colossus_computer#Turing.27s_Colossus
_participation>

`[Turing] was a major participant in the code breaking efforts at
Bletchley Park and contributed several mathematical insights, both to
breaking the Engima code and the Lorenz code. He also built the "bombe"
there, an electromechanical code breaking device for the Enigma code. He
didn't play a major role in design or construction of Colossus; that was
Newman's deal.'

The bombes were electro-mechanical and developed from the earlier
Polish-designed bomba. But Turing was a mathematician - such folk are
famously hopeless at practical work. I don't picture him waving a
soldering iron around under any useful control. I've read a lot about
his mathematical analysis of the problems and the software ideas he
developed.

This is what he did on the Manchester Baby project:

===================================================================
<http://www.computer50.org/mark1/turing.html>:

Turing joined the Department of Mathematics as a Reader, with the
nominal title of "Deputy Director of the Royal Society Computing Machine
Laboratory". (The Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory was the
room the Baby occupied; there was no known "Director"!) It is not clear
what his official duties were initially with respect to the Baby/Mark 1
project. Before Turing started work in Manchester he asked for the Baby
order code and sent up a routine for long division, which was corrected
and got working by Tootill. As soon as the Manchester Mark 1 was
generally available for use in April 1949, he enthusiastically set about
using it, especially to investigate Mersenne Primes, in collaboration
with Newman.
===================================================================

The Colossus project was headed by Tommy Flowers, one of the men behind
the Manchester computers, and Turing wasn't involved in the actual
craftwork that I've heard of. The job was done by the Post Office:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer#The_construction_of_Colo
ssus>

======================================================================
The construction of Colossus

A team headed by Tommy Flowers spent eleven months (early February 1943
to early January 1944) designing and building Colossus at the Post
Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, in northwest London. After a
functional test in December 1943, Colossus was dismantled and shipped
north to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944, and
attacked its first message on 5 February.[1]
======================================================================

But you're right about not turning off - that was standard practice on
all these early valve powered computers, even in development. And of
course you'd be able to tell from the squawk what kind of a shock
someone's had.

And no trivial electronics either:
he was responsible for the first cryptophone.
This allowed Churchill and Roosevelt to talk to each other
over a radio link, without Stalin and Hitler listening in.

Utter bullshit. The secure voice channel gear you're thinking of was
developed in the USA by Bell Labs and was a long way from the *first*
cryptophone. Turing played a part, but you can't see he was responsible
for it - my guess is that he wasn't a circuit designer so much as an
algorithm designer.

<http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ukusa.html>

For how things went for him in the USA, in particular comments about the
US bombe design <http://www.turing.org.uk/sources/dayton123.html>; no
sign of HT anything in what he's talking about that I can see.

Anf for all that he wasn't impressed with the US plans for 4 wheel
bombes, the US bombes were made and proved to be very fast and reliable:
far superior to the British 4 wheel bombe (which was utter crap from
what I gather).

=====================================================================
<http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00020.cfm>

The Green Hornet to the Rescue

Efforts to create a secure voice system had existed since the 1920s.
Some progress had been made, but as with the A-3, no device was able to
offer complete security. In the early 1940's however, the situation
began to improve. Bell Telephone Laboratories, under the direction of A.
B. Clark (who later headed up the research and development effort at the
fledgling NSA), and assisted by British mathematician Alan Turing, began
work on what would become known as "the Green Hornet." The design of the
system was based on earlier 1930s-era research on the transforming of
voice signals into digital data. The device earned the nickname for the
buzzing noise heard by someone attempting to eavesdrop on the
conversation. The "buzz" closely resembled the theme song of the popular
serial radio show of the time that went by the same title. In time,
however, it acquired the more formal moniker of SIGSALY.
=====================================================================

And then there's this:

=====================================================================
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY#Development>

At the time of its inception, long distance telephone communicatons were
broadcast using the "A-3" voice scrambler developed by AT&T. The Nazis
had a listening station on the Dutch coast which could intercept and
break A-3 traffic[1].

Although telephone scramblers were used by both sides in World War II,
they were known not to be very secure in general, and both sides often
cracked the scrambled conversations of the other. Inspection of the
audio spectrum using a spectrum analyzer often provided significant
clues to the scrambling technique. The insecurity of most telephone
scrambler schemes led to the development of a more secure scrambler,
based on the one-time pad principle.

A prototype was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories, better known
as "Bell Labs", and demonstrated to the US Army. The Army was impressed
and awarded Bell Labs a contract for two systems in 1942. SIGSALY went
into service in 1943 and remained in service until 1946.

=====================================================================

[snip]

Rowland.

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