We lost engineer Tommy Flowers MBE on this day in 1998; he designed Colossus (the world's first programmable computer, although arguably not Turing-complete) which was used to break the German 12-rotor Lorenz cipher. He also worked on ERNIE, which generated random numbers for the Premium Bonds. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography