Sometimes I wonder why the Info Tech people call a pc sitting on someone's desk a "machine." After all, a machine is "apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task." Least, that's what the dictionary says.
So to be a machine, something mechanical must be going on, or something has to be moving? Can't always say that about a lot of office pc's. On most of them, nothing is moving, not even the operator.
But maybe this is why. The Nazis invented a form of computer called the coding machine or "enigma" machine, to keep their business a secret during World War II. It was a sort of typewriter that would automatically type a coded letter for whatever you typed. Rotors and gears would mix up the letters to produce gibberish, and when a person at the other end got the message, he would type the crazy words into his machine, which would print out the correct message as he typed.
By so doing, the Nazis figured they would be keeping their troop movements and attack plans a secret. Ask your history teacher how that worked out.
And not too long ago, a dive team was in the Baltic Sea, looking to retrieve old discarded fishing nets to save marine life from getting caught up in them when they found one of those old coding machines on the sea floor, between Davey Jones's locker and Spongebob's.
Like anything else thought to be unimpregnable, the enigma machine was no match for the rest of the world's top non-German minds, and the our side figured out how to crack the code and soon we knew what Hitler wanted for lunch (braunschweiger on rye with a pickle and a beer) before his people even had a chance to order it.
This machine is being restored and will be on display at a German museum.
The modern equivalent to all these scrambled letters is any message I get from certain friends on my phone. With all the abbreviations and acronyms and slangy jargon, most of them are enigmas to me.
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