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I just found this old adding machine in our warehouse. I figured some of you might find it interesting.
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Oct 13, 2016 18:35
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Wonder if it still works?
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Oct 13, 2016 20:24
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Nice. One of the ones created before the discovery of zero. Also I'd like to imagine that that massive [ + ] handle is attached to a pull-start cord.
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Oct 13, 2016 20:28
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Why does it have so many duplicate numbers? Is each tied to a specific place in the number?
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Oct 13, 2016 20:35
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chitoryu12 posted:Why does it have so many duplicate numbers? Is each tied to a specific place in the number? It's a Burroughs adding machine. The way the mechanical action worked required that many keys. Past that, somebody more knowledgeable in the operation of one would have to explain. edit: It's too bad the BUNCH got beaten so heavily by IBM. Burroughs, at least, was always trying new things in the computer field to stay competitive, including inventing most of the precursors to modern banking equipment and software. Kwyndig has a new favorite as of 21:14 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 21:09
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Burroughs invented Nixie tubes (Neon Indicator, eXperimental, № 1), which is pretty cool.
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Oct 14, 2016 01:18
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AFewBricksShy posted:I just found this old adding machine in our warehouse. I figured some of you might find it interesting. Theres one poster in the Tech Relics thread that might want to buy that from you I think. (really cannot remember if it was this thread or the other). http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3756559&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=213
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Oct 14, 2016 08:53
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You guys, I went to the Deutsche Museum in Munich Germany a couple days ago. They have so much cool old stuff. I tried to grab pictures of the explanations when they were in English but I didn't get everything. Hopefully that doesn't detract from all the neat pictures. Here are some previews. They have an Enigma Machine!   https://goo.gl/photos/ncS5MUWt5HpQSHoM7 Phone posted so if those pictures are too big or the album doesn't work please let me know.
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Oct 14, 2016 09:08
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Antioch posted:Enigma Machine! Oh that's weird I always thought it was just a bag with a length of hose coming out the bottom.
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Oct 14, 2016 09:18
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GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:Wonder if it still works? I plugged it in, it made a big *thunk* that scared the poo poo out of me but then seemed to work. It then jammed when I tried adding 444.00, so it needs to be cleaned out a lot. There's easily 40-50+ years of marble dust in that thing. I'm going to bring it home this weekend and see if I can clean it out. From what I've been able to find online, it was made between 1945 and 1949, based on the key shape and the color. It's a burroughs Series P. AFewBricksShy has a new favorite as of 16:53 on Oct 14, 2016 |
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Oct 14, 2016 15:56
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chitoryu12 posted:Why does it have so many duplicate numbers? Is each tied to a specific place in the number? Yep, that's exactly it. The rightmost column is the ones, next one to the left is tens, then comes hundreds, thousands, etc. I made a video on the subject of keyboards like that using my Mercedes Euklid 29 as the testing dummy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD7EeEAQpC8
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Oct 14, 2016 16:36
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How do you do zeroes on that machine, just don't press any key for that column?
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Oct 14, 2016 18:54
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InediblePenguin posted:How do you do zeroes on that machine, just don't press any key for that column? That's right. No key pressed is an implied 0.
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Oct 14, 2016 20:03
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Antioch posted:You guys, I went to the Deutsche Museum in Munich Germany a couple days ago. They have so much cool old stuff. I tried to grab pictures of the explanations when they were in English but I didn't get everything. Hopefully that doesn't detract from all the neat pictures. Go to the NSA Museum of Cryptography near Baltimore and they have two usable Enigma machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBNc-lpJXU
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Oct 14, 2016 20:09
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chitoryu12 posted:usable 
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Oct 15, 2016 16:40
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Antioch posted:You guys, I went to the Deutsche Museum in Munich Germany a couple days ago. They have so much cool old stuff. I tried to grab pictures of the explanations when they were in English but I didn't get everything. Hopefully that doesn't detract from all the neat pictures.  I love the Enigma!The beautiful thing about it is that it's all relatively simple clockwork, and all it actually does is connect a given key to different light bulbs depending on the current configuration of the rotors. So in just a few minutes, you can completely understand the operating principle... and also understand why it has its biggest flaw: a letter can never be enciphered to itself. (That is, an E can become any other letter in the encrypted text, but never still be an E. If you're Alan Turing, and you have a guess as to a word that might be found in the coded message, it's easy to see where it might be, and what that might mean for the key that was being used.) This page is an excellent overview of how it works. And if you feel like playing around with one, there are plenty of emulators that are 100% accurate to the real hardware. This one that runs right in the browser is convenient to use, but doesn't try to re-create the look of the machine. For that, there are fantastic programs for Windows and Android. Powered Descent has a new favorite as of 18:13 on Oct 15, 2016 |
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Oct 15, 2016 18:10
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Did anyone ever attach a printed output directly to an enigma machine? I can't imagine transcribing more than a day's messages before replacing all the light bulbs with solenoids strapped to a typewriter or something.
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Oct 15, 2016 18:49
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Cat Hatter posted:Did anyone ever attach a printed output directly to an enigma machine? I can't imagine transcribing more than a day's messages before replacing all the light bulbs with solenoids strapped to a typewriter or something. They existed but I think they were fairly rare.
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Oct 15, 2016 18:57
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Powered Descent posted:
Yeah, not being able to encode a letter to itself is a huge flaw in cryptography, and that and a few mechanical flaws in the way the wheels worked were the only reason we were able to break the Enigma with the technology of the time in a usable fashion. Don't get me wrong, the boffins at Bletchley Park were brilliant and Alan Turing was definitely a man ahead of his time, but if the Nazis had actually understood the flaws in the machine they'd built and corrected them, there's a good chance we wouldn't have had actionable intelligence off of the Enigma (we would have still obtained intelligence off of Enigma coded transmissions, but it probably would have been decoded too late to be useful for planning purposes until sometime after D-Day). Honestly, I'm more impressed that BP managed to break the Lorenz machines, as they didn't have a working German model of one until after they'd already broken it and unlike Enigma they had very little coded transmissions to go by, since it was reserved for telex instead of the more frequent morse radio transmissions.
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Oct 15, 2016 19:06
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This is a repost of one of my favorite stories from the cracking of the Enigma, from Mavis Batey:quote:The one snag with Enigma of course is the fact that if you press A, you can get every other letter but A. I picked up this message and—one was so used to looking at things and making instant decisions—I thought: 'Something's gone. What has this chap done? There is not a single L in this message.' The printer for the Enigma was the Schreibmax.  It took a lot of effort to install. There's only one unit known to still be working, and it takes a lot of effort to figure out how to get the drat things to work today.
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Oct 15, 2016 19:36
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Powered Descent posted:
If you really want to understand how simple it is, [build one out of paper!](http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma) Seriously the Enigma is beautiful in its simplicity-to-effectiveness ratio. It had some major flaws which are now well-known, but it worked very well until a very dedicated effort was put in to break it
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Oct 15, 2016 20:13
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How long would it take modern software to crack an enigma message out of curiosity. Keep in mind that I have no idea how such software works. Would it need a crib even?
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Oct 15, 2016 20:19
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chitoryu12 posted:This is a repost of one of my favorite stories from the cracking of the Enigma, from Mavis Batey: quote:On 30 August 1941, a message of some 4,000 characters was transmitted from Athens to Vienna. However, the message was not received correctly at the other end, so (after the recipient sent an unencoded request for retransmission, which let the codebreakers know what was happening) the message was retransmitted with the same key settings (HQIBPEXEZMUG); a forbidden practice. Moreover, the second time the operator made a number of small alterations to the message, such as using abbreviations, making the second message somewhat shorter. From these two related ciphertexts, known to cryptanalysts as a depth, the veteran cryptanalyst Brigadier John Tiltman in the Research Section teased out the two plaintexts and hence the keystream.
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Oct 15, 2016 21:32
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Lizard Combatant posted:How long would it take modern software to crack an enigma message out of curiosity. Keep in mind that I have no idea how such software works. Would it need a crib even? Modern cryptoanalysis software could probably break an Enigma message in a few seconds, especially if they knew it was coming from an Enigma. With an electronic model of an Enigma machine as a base, your average desktop PC could break an Enigma code pretty much instantly, it already handles much more complex ciphers on a day to day basis.
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Oct 15, 2016 21:37
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Kwyndig posted:Modern cryptoanalysis software could probably break an Enigma message in a few seconds, especially if they knew it was coming from an Enigma. With an electronic model of an Enigma machine as a base, your average desktop PC could break an Enigma code pretty much instantly, it already handles much more complex ciphers on a day to day basis. Cool!
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Oct 15, 2016 22:01
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Kwyndig posted:Modern cryptoanalysis software could probably break an Enigma message in a few seconds, especially if they knew it was coming from an Enigma. With an electronic model of an Enigma machine as a base, your average desktop PC could break an Enigma code pretty much instantly, it already handles much more complex ciphers on a day to day basis. That's only true if you know a few things ahead of time, like the internal structure of the wheels, and possibly even some of the original text to know what to search for. Just bruteforcing it, there's no real way around the 150 fucktillion combinations. This isn't comparable to decrypting AES messages (which I assume you meant), but rather bruteforcing the key.
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Oct 15, 2016 22:24
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Keiya posted:If you really want to understand how simple it is, [build one out of paper!](http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma)  That is brilliant and I'm totally making one of those.
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Oct 15, 2016 23:57
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insta posted:That's only true if you know a few things ahead of time, like the internal structure of the wheels, and possibly even some of the original text to know what to search for. Just bruteforcing it, there's no real way around the 150 fucktillion combinations. This isn't comparable to decrypting AES messages (which I assume you meant), but rather bruteforcing the key. To be fair a lot of those combos come from the jumpers, and substitution ciphers are super easy to crack. Really comes down to how many messages you give the modern computer access to; no technique the decryptos had access to is impossible on a modern machine.
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Oct 16, 2016 00:18
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The Enigma was a deeply flawed machine in operation, the number of possible code combinations on it was actually around half or less of what it was mathematically capable of, not even considering the actual flaws in the design, simply due to the instructions operators had to work with. It was merely around 16x1019 possible combinations, and considering a modern desktop computer can manage multiple TFLOPS on its GPU alone, brute forcing any short Enigma message without any decrypted data wouldn't take more than a few days (and Enigma messages were always short). If you throw in a real workhorse beast like the ones the NSA uses, I wouldn't put near instantaneous brute force decryption out of the realm of possibility. None of that matters though, because we have all the breaks for the Enigma already, so decrypting messages sent using one is child's play. Brute force isn't possible with modern encryption schemes because they are orders of magnitude more complex as well as incorporating new math we've discovered since then. 128 bit encryption has 2128 possible combinations or somewhere around 3x1038, which would require over 1018 years to brute force with a desktop computer (that's where the whole 'longer than the age of the universe' sound bite comes from). Even a computer capable of yottaFLOPs (an insane beast of a machine exponentially faster than anything ever built) would take millions of years to brute force it. Which is why modern cryptoanalysis is based on finding or making breaks and side channel attacks instead of brute force.
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Oct 16, 2016 00:22
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Lizard Combatant posted:How long would it take modern software to crack an enigma message out of curiosity. Keep in mind that I have no idea how such software works. Would it need a crib even? Unix actually used to ship a program called "crypt" that was based on the Enigma machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix) It's also interesting to note how absolutely poo poo encryption options for civilians were until, what, the late 90s? One reason was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States and I suppose another reason was that good crypto is going to be slow as poo poo on a 486.
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Oct 16, 2016 00:24
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8-Bit Guy went and did a bunch of testing and confirmed that yes, VHS really was dogshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P00QS3lXJeI
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Oct 16, 2016 04:27
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The End posted:8-Bit Guy went and did a bunch of testing and confirmed that yes, VHS really was dogshit. VHS was such a dogshit format, yeah. There were several points of mechanical failure that could actually destroy either your storage medium, your playback device, or both. Imagine if a DVD had a chance of spontaneously bricking your player or just plain disintegrating in the player tray.
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Oct 16, 2016 04:43
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The End posted:8-Bit Guy went and did a bunch of testing and confirmed that yes, VHS really was dogshit. You cannot post anything VHS without this gloriously bad video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o Oh god I forgot his haircut and the music choices. EDIT: I thought I would check his other videos to see if it was a skit or something. Nope just as crazy making coffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWuyrlXI7nA Humphreys has a new favorite as of 05:07 on Oct 16, 2016 |
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Oct 16, 2016 04:56
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Kwyndig posted:VHS was such a dogshit format, yeah. There were several points of mechanical failure that could actually destroy either your storage medium, your playback device, or both. Imagine if a DVD had a chance of spontaneously bricking your player or just plain disintegrating in the player tray. I remember I somehow found a VHS copy of Roujin Z that was so delicate that the tape broke twice the first (and only) time I tried to play it. But I loved VHS and had a 6 foot bookshelf double-faced with tapes!
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Oct 16, 2016 04:56
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I was in Goodwill a few months ago and a prime midlate 80s VCR with the popup top and actual levers and switches was on sale for $30. The thing even had a little analog clock for time. I really wish I had a place for that piece of poo poo. 
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Oct 16, 2016 06:19
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Humphreys posted:EDIT: I thought I would check his other videos to see if it was a skit or something. Nope just as crazy making coffee: I notice he has a PSU in his sink, is that how you clean them?
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Oct 16, 2016 11:31
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The End posted:8-Bit Guy went and did a bunch of testing and confirmed that yes, VHS really was dogshit. But watching those movies on a standard probably-no-bigger-than-25" TV, it was just fine.
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Oct 16, 2016 13:16
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Mister Kingdom posted:But watching those movies on a standard probably-no-bigger-than-25" TV, it was just fine. How old are you? We had a VCR and no it wasn't fine at all. The quality was poo poo, noticeably lower than even noise-heavy analog TV. Fast forward and rewind were slow and full of noise and still image was unusable garbage. It was "fine" in that it was intelligible but nobody considered it "good". Quality was just something that wasn't available at the consumer level
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Oct 16, 2016 13:43
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Mister Kingdom posted:But watching those movies on a standard probably-no-bigger-than-25" TV, it was just fine. Yeah, and ours was on a 32" and later a 36" and if you got a new release the day it came out, fine, but if it had been played before it was already on its way to shitsville.
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Oct 16, 2016 14:12
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Yeah VHS was garbage. I've never jumped on a new format technology faster than I jumped on DVD. I'm kind of sad that the time of having a movie collection on your shelf is mostly obsolete technology now, but gently caress if I want to go back to inserting discs to watch movies like some kind of animal.
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Oct 16, 2016 14:48
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