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Comments on: Building An Old Box https://whynow.dumka.us/2011/05/28/building-an-old-box/ On-line Opinion Magazine...OK, it's a blog Mon, 30 May 2011 19:42:31 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: Bryan https://whynow.dumka.us/2011/05/28/building-an-old-box/comment-page-1/#comment-56615 Mon, 30 May 2011 19:42:31 +0000 http://whynow.dumka.us/?p=20856#comment-56615 Almost all of the early drones that were built in the 1950s and tested locally used a rotary phone dialer for input because there were so many devices already built by Bell Labs, among others, that could receive and interpret those codes and set a pattern of relays as a result.

If you could understand a telephone interchange, understanding a binary adder circuit is trivial. It really is all about switches, whether they are mechanical, electro-mechanical, or electronic. The problem is the complexity of figuring out how to wire the switches together to get the desired result. Being able to do that without anything to guide you, like a schematic, is the real talent.

It is amazing that they accomplished the concept to product is such a short time.

]]> By: Kryten42 https://whynow.dumka.us/2011/05/28/building-an-old-box/comment-page-1/#comment-56610 Mon, 30 May 2011 07:40:46 +0000 http://whynow.dumka.us/?p=20856#comment-56610 Truly amazing stuff! As an Engineer, I’m in awe! It’s amazing that the work done by the likes of Bill Tutte probably couldn’t be replicated today. He was effectively the world’s first hacker! 😆 He reverse engineered a German enciphering machine he’d never seen and created a machine to decipher the coded messages, all on paper and his own head! Could you imaging telling a would be Master’s or PhD grad that they had to produce an original work without using any computer system? It might, at least, flush away all the jokers pretending they know anything. 😆 I’ve mentioned my UK PhD friend who studied at Oxford in the 50’s, they never had any catalog’s where they could phone and get any equipment they needed, it all had to be designed and built by themselves.

Ehhh!

You should read Cryptonomicon Bryan (good tip Steve! It should be required reading for Science/IT/Engineering students IMNSHO). It’s one of the few books I kept (I think it was published about 10 years ago or so?) It was a kind of comparison of 40’s era & 90’s era cryptography, codebreaking, etc (in an extremely simple nutshell). Actually… that doesn’t do it justice at all (from what I remember of it). 😆 You’ll have to read it. 😉

]]> By: Bryan https://whynow.dumka.us/2011/05/28/building-an-old-box/comment-page-1/#comment-56607 Mon, 30 May 2011 01:06:33 +0000 http://whynow.dumka.us/?p=20856#comment-56607 If I ever get some time, I’ll put it on the stack, Steve.

]]> By: Steve Bates https://whynow.dumka.us/2011/05/28/building-an-old-box/comment-page-1/#comment-56605 Sun, 29 May 2011 22:33:34 +0000 http://whynow.dumka.us/?p=20856#comment-56605 Bryan, if you haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s quasi-historical novel Cryptonomicon, I’m pretty sure you would enjoy it.

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