Communication History
Okay, where we were we? CDMA? Groan. Let's talk instead about communication history today. Don Kimberlin (internal link) is back in the States after months in England. This is on Station X and the first programmable computer. Neat stuff. He reports:
"I'm back now, have a jillion things to catch up on, and will resume correspondence shortly. Just to tease you, among The Things I Learned on Summer Vacation were that Eniac, the widely claimed 'first electronic computer,' wasn't. Two years earlier, the British code breakers at Bletchley Park, had a machine named Colossus up and running, for the purpose of breaking German crypto codes. Bletchley Park is most famous for being the place that broke the daily-changing codes of the German 'Enigma' machine, but a later code run by a Lorenz teleprinter was even more complex. Since Bletchley Park was run by Britain's secretive MI-6, ALL documents and machines there were destroyed when it was shut down in the late 1940's. Now, years later, it's being rebuilt from memories and copies of documents now being released from American secret files that are being opened. You can see more at:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/page.cfm?pageid=159 (external link)