The famous computer at Bletchley Park is now working again 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7094881.stm
No longer involved in airsoft.
Wow, wonderful news.
I'm amazed that it is actually just as fast as a Pentium 2 at cracking an Enigma cypher. Just because it is a dedicated machine.
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Final Followup (I hope) : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7213215.stm
No longer involved in airsoft.
Amazing to think that the computer was a Brit invention.
As is the world wide web (not the internet but the www protocols and conventions everyone uses)
Oh and the steam engine
and the aeroplane
and the jet engine
and oodles of stuff i've been reading about latley
What isnt very well known if that 'bombe' was mainly used for enigma and enigma could make about 22,000,000,000,000 variable ciphers.
The problem was that only the luftwaffe and navy really used enigma which was limited to transmissions of 500 characters
The heer mainly used a system called 'secret writer' (geheimscrieber) which had a few thousand million BILLION combinations.
This was cracked by a guy called Tommy Flowers using a machine he mainly built himself as the government were not iniitally interested.
However his employers at the PO gave him as much time as he like and partially funded his COLOSSUS machine.
His machine cracked the far more complex and strategically important geheimscrieber codes and changed the war.
Most folk know about enigma hardly anyone has heard about geheimscrieber
"I think we are in rats' alley - Where the dead men lost their bones."
And of course the basis of the Enigma machine (the rotor machine) was invented by two Dutch naval officers
Not many people know that 
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