Recently I visited Bletchley Park, the location where Alan Turing lead the team that cracked the codes transmitted using the German Enigma and Lorenz Cipher during WWII. Learning about how the enigma worked, and how rudimentary it seemed to me got me thinking about how people of the future may think the same about current cryptographic methods. It’s easy to think of the Enigma to be a rudimentary machine without considering the computing power that was available at the time. The oldest working computer in the world (Harwell Computer), located at Bletchley Park, would take a year to perform a number of operations that a modern day smart phone could calculate in 100 ms.
The Harwell Computer
