British Tabulating Machine Company

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The British Tabulating Machine Company ( BTM for short ; German  " British Tabulating Machine Company " ) was a British company for the manufacture of tabulating machines . During World War II , it played a significant role in the successful British breach of the Enigma rotor key machine used by the German military to encrypt their secret communications . The electromechanical machine, called the Turing bomb , used by the Codebreakers in Bletchley Park (BP), England , was manufactured by BTM .

Beginnings

The company was founded in 1902 in London under the name The Tab Limited founded and produced under license of American Tabulating Machine Company , which later became the global company IBM was that of Herman Hollerith developed Hollerith machine . In 1909 the name of the company was changed to British Tabulating Machine Company Limited before moving to Letchworth in 1920 , a town about 60 km north of the British capital in the county of Hertfordshire . Shortly after that began BTM also with the development and manufacture of its own electro-mechanical machines, a capability that was used after the outbreak of World War II by the British government to that of Alan Turing devised Entzifferungsmaschine to be produced.

Turing bomb

Replica of one of the Turing bombs made by BTM

Under the leadership of the British engineer Harold Keen (1894–1973), who had become chief engineer at BTM in the 1930s , only a few individual pieces of the Turing bomb were initially produced, starting in 1940, based on his idea the Letchworth Enigma based. After by Gordon Welch Mans invention of the diagonal board ( German  "Diagonal Board" ) has been considerably improved the efficiency of the machine, production was significantly increased. By the end of 1941, twelve copies were made under the code name “ CANTAB ” and by the end of the war more than 210 bombs were used to “ crack ” the encrypted German radio messages in BP . During the war there were over two and a half million.

HEC computer

After the war, at the beginning of the 1950s, BTM built one of the first mass-produced tube computers , the Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC) , initially the HEC 1 model and shortly thereafter the successors HEC 2 and HEC 4 . A restored original copy of the HEC 1 is now in the National Museum of Computing on the grounds of Bletchley Park.

Merger

In 1959, BTM merged with its former competitor Powers-Samas to form International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) , which in 1968 merged with English Electric (EE) to form International Computers Limited (ICL) , which was finally taken over by the Japanese technology group Fujitsu in 2002 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 11. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  2. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer: Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, p. 442.
  3. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 345. ISBN 0-304-36662-5 .
  4. ^ Kris Gaj, Arkadiusz Orłowski: Facts and myths of Enigma: breaking stereotypes. Eurocrypt, 2003, p. 121ff.
  5. ↑ Stephen Pincock and Mark Frary: Secret Codes - The Most Famous Encryption Techniques and Their History . Bastei Lübbe, 2007, p. 109. ISBN 3-431-03734-8 .