The Computer That Helped Win World War II

One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German Enigma network, the “new music” was a rhythmic warble of binary teletype code being transmitted at high speed. Germany’s wartime engineers had developed a radically new encryption and transmission system.