test-drb

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

101090 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jon Elson > such as to not evacuate Coventry when they knew it was next for getting > blitzed. Ah, this is alas an urban legend ('bogo-meme', to coin a nice neologism); started, IIRC, by Winterbotham. This has been demolished, by, among others, R. V. Jones, who was in a position to know (as the recipient of Ultra material at the Air Ministry), in his biographical work, "The Wizard War", pp. 147-151. He refers to evidence given by John Martin (Churchill's secretary, who was with him in the car that night), and John Colville (Assistant Private Secretary, who was on duty at 10 Downing St. that night). They are both quite clear that the target was unknown before the raid started; Jones gives the details on why not. > there are some descriptions that the actual wiring of the rotors was > done AT Bletchley I'd love to read about that - do you know/recall where you saw it? > If a German spy was to get his hands on the drawings for even one > (wired) rotor, they would have realized how thoroughly the British had > penetrated the Enigma system I am less certain of this. I seem to recall (alas, too busy to look it up, unless someone's really interested) that the Germans had something of a modern concept of code security, where it's assumed that the actual ciphering machine is compromised, and security depends on the security of the keys. Given the wide deployment of Enigma at the tactical level, the odds were good that the machine itself had been compromised. So for them to have found out that the British had the rotor wiring would not have been a big surprise, I would expect. However, had they gotten any kind of detailed description of the Bombe, it would have not been that hard to work out that its use was to break into Enigma. In that sense, the Bombe's overall design was in fact a bigger secret than the fact that they had the rotor wiring. And of course as a result of the XX system, the British were fairly sure that there were no German spies in the UK at the time, anyway. Noel

11 years, 6 months

RadioShack Store Closure List

by cctalk＠fahimi.net

Thought people would be interested to know: http://www.businessinsider.com/radioshack-store-closure-list-2015-2 -Ali

11 years, 6 months

OT: Can anyone identify this tool?

by sales＠elecplus.com

https://plus.google.com/photos/106111250846948401252/albums/6114301294379699 009?banner=pwa I picked it up, new, at the recycler, thinking it was a drill bit, but it is not. It is 13 cm long, and has a light or lens of some sort at the small end. The large end is about 3/4". It appears to be made of stainless steel. Engraved on it is QD90-6722. I added another pic, showing the larger end. There is a lens of some sort inside, and light shines through to the lens at the smaller end. Cindy Croxton

11 years, 6 months

imitation game movie

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lawrence Wilkinson > If you're going to condense 5 years of military, academic and > engineering development into a movie then things are going to suffer. > I think they did a reasonably good job. If the former's what they'd done, I'd agree. (And I can think of historical movies that have done that, and still produced a movie that was both very watchable, and reasonably accurate; e.g. in "The Gathering Storm", they've made Ralph Wigram stand in for a bunch of people, including him, who fed data to Churchill. I can live with that; too many characters would just confuse the average viewer.) But the Imitation Game writer(s) did a lot more than that. E.g. the whole bogus 'Turing versus his Blimpian manager who wanted to shut his project down' meme. That's completely bogus, 173 degrees out of phase with the truth, and clearly added purely to give, well, I'm not sure what. The thing is that what he and the others at BP (although he was primus inter pares, there were others such as Welchman, Tutte, etc who made massive, remarkable additions - and, as you point out, in the end it was an industrial-scale enterprise) did was so amazing, and they had to struggle against such difficulties, they didn't _need_ to 'sex up' the plot with that kind of stupid cliche. As far as I'm concerned, all those lame hackneyed plot elements just prove that the script-writer(s) were distinctly third-rate - because if they were actually any good, there's more than enough powerful material in Turing's actual story to make a much, much better movie, without relying on that kind of pathetic bilge. Noel

11 years, 6 months

imitation game movie

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Chuck Guzis > "the first electronic digital computer" I think that's a bit of a stretch; the ABC wasn't really a computer (as we think of them). As someone (forget the name) said, for those early machines, if you add enough adjectives, each one is the first <something>. Here's my list (in temporal order): ABC - first electronic digital computing device COLOSSUS - first large-scale electronic digital computing device heavily used for actual work ENIAC - first general-purpose electronic digital computing device Manchester Baby - first operational stored-program computer EDSAC - first stored-program computer heavily used for actual work Noel

11 years, 6 months

begging drivers/docs for obscure old PC/Mac hardware

by bear＠typewritten.org

Folks; Over time, I have accreted some assorted unusual hardware for PC and Macintosh, for which I lack the software to drive it. I know we have some terrific packrats on the list, so I'm shaking the tree, to see what might fall out. * DuPont Imaging Systems MacBlitz NuBus RISC processor. Apparently this is a Clipper CPU which runs UNIX independently of the host Macintosh, with IPC of some description. Has its own ethernet and SCSI interfaces. The Googles know almost nothing about this. * Vermont Microsystems Image Manager 1024 (IM-1024) 1024x800 PGC-compatible display adapter. Supposedly there were AutoCAD, GEM, Windows 1.x and 2.x drivers at one time. I'd love to see any of them. * Matrox "Space Machine" SM-1280 solid modeling graphics adapter. I'm not sure what kind of drivers were available; possibly it was just a set of development libraries for programming the board yourself. * Matrox PG-1280 (and/or the Microchannel equivalent MC-1281) graphics accelerator. I'd love to see any DOS-era PC drivers, or the PRPQ that let this board work under AIX on an RT. Somebody on the VC Forum thought he had these installed on a running system, but I never heard any further news. * Hercules Chrome TIGA (40 MHz TMS-34020) graphics accelerator. I have a Windows 3.1 driver for this, but I'm not sure the card is set up correctly. Mainly looking for documentation here. * IBM 5364 S/36 PC SSP, MCODE, and/or DOS host software. Somebody on the list kindly sent me a disk image of just enough of the DOS host software to prove my 5364 runs, but it's not a complete install and is missing some features I wanted to enable (keyboard maps mainly, IIRC). In addition, without the MCODE floppies the system can't be reconfigured for the various communications options (bisync, SDLC, etc.) my host PC has installed. Shoot, I thought there was something else, too. I guess I'll think of it eventually. Anyone? ok bear. -- until further notice

11 years, 6 months

Windows CE

by sales＠elecplus.com

Someone asked awhile back for Windows CE software, but I did not save the post. I have a sealed package with CE 2.1, includes COA. Cindy Croxton

11 years, 6 months

imitation game movie

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Fred Cisin > Or Zuse? Oh, $DEITY; forgot about him! So modify a few of the latter entries in my list to add 'electronic'... :-) Noel

11 years, 6 months

Magnetic tape filesystem

by tom_a_sparks＠yahoo.com.au

I am wondering if there were any magnetic tape filesystem? I know that some micro you could give a name to your data/program on the audio cassette and they had a catalogue feature I also know about Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Has anyone tried putting cp/m or fat filesystem on audio cassette?

11 years, 6 months

imitation game movie

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jon Elson > has anybody seen the Imitation Game movie, ostensibly about Alan Turing? > .. > Any comments? I have, and I also have extensively studied both WWII codebreaking, and Turing's life and work. It's an OK movie, but as any kind of historical thing - fuhgeddaboutit. There are so many 'errors' (changes) that it's basically impossible to list them all. They ran about about one error/change per minute, throughout the whole movie. It's more wrong than right, actually. About the only thing that was absolutley accurate (other than the basic concept, that Turing worked at BP and helped break German codes) was Joan Clarke's soliloquy in his flat at the end of the movie, describing his contribution to the world. > Various descriptions have hundreds of people at Bletchley wiring the > rotors and doing much of the other work. The Bombe parts must have been > made in machine shops across England. Hmm. The descriptions I've seen of their manufacture (e.g. Gordon Welchman, "The Hut Six Story", pp. 138-141, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, "Enigma: The Battle for the Code", pp. 56-58) all indicate that the machines were manufactured by British Tabulating Machines in their Letchworth factory (about half-way between BP and Cambridge), and only came to BP once they were completed. There was a lot of local sub-contracting of small sub-assemblies which didn't require machining, though (see Welchman). Noel

11 years, 6 months

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