The "Official Bletchley Story?" I don't believe it ...
by sundialsvcs from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6HMMR)
According to the "official version of events," Bletchley Park was somehow able to decrypt at least hundreds of Enigma messages, each and every day, using nothing more than a (relatively primitive ...) "Bombe" machine. Conspicuously absent, in this entire "official tale," is any knowledge of "a general-purpose digital computer."
But we already know that an individual named Konrad Zuse was already experimenting with "more-or-less 'programmable' computers," and actually attempting to commercialize them. He publicly advertised in newspapers, well before the War began. Therefore, it simply cannot be said that his work, and the implications of it, "were unknown to Bletchley."
(We also perfectly-well know, today, that "the ENIAC" was not, in fact, "built to calculate artillery firing tables.") It, too, was a codebreaking machine.
But, if Bletchley didn't actually "do it" by somehow solving messages one-at-a-time using equipment like "the Bombe," how might they actually have done it? My guess is that they took advantage of the fact that all of the daily messages on any particular circuit were necessarily related, and that "each day, there were hundreds or thousands of them." Each of them varied only by "a three-letter key." But, if there were thousands of them readily available each day, "the underlying 'secret' simply became 'a level playing surface.'" Even though you didn't know what it was, you actually didn't have to.
But we already know that an individual named Konrad Zuse was already experimenting with "more-or-less 'programmable' computers," and actually attempting to commercialize them. He publicly advertised in newspapers, well before the War began. Therefore, it simply cannot be said that his work, and the implications of it, "were unknown to Bletchley."
(We also perfectly-well know, today, that "the ENIAC" was not, in fact, "built to calculate artillery firing tables.") It, too, was a codebreaking machine.
But, if Bletchley didn't actually "do it" by somehow solving messages one-at-a-time using equipment like "the Bombe," how might they actually have done it? My guess is that they took advantage of the fact that all of the daily messages on any particular circuit were necessarily related, and that "each day, there were hundreds or thousands of them." Each of them varied only by "a three-letter key." But, if there were thousands of them readily available each day, "the underlying 'secret' simply became 'a level playing surface.'" Even though you didn't know what it was, you actually didn't have to.