Marc de Piolenc wrote: >Ultra originated in Poland, not Britain. The wartime decryption work was >of course carried out in Britain, but without the prewar "seed" work of >the Poles it would probably have been futile.
And not only Ultra is rightfully based on the Poles' original work, but the computer itself. The latter credit is almost never given to the three young Polish mathematicians who pointed the way for using math to reverse engineer mechancial crypto machines. No doubt that the far greater British human and material resources developed the Polish ideas behind Ultra and the bombe and grew them into a giant wartime cracking machine, that machine was and would have been a far different enterprise without the Polish initiative. Wartime industries and their succeeding commercial and governmental inheritors have a way of bestowing credit on organizations, with a bit of slathering of praise on exceptional individuals to gild the tin, but what endures are institutional histories to buttress investments while the individuals wither and dies, in person and in credit, at least until they are so long dead they cannot remind the history writers of what is truth and what bullshit. Once time comes it's then all bullshit for making movies. A movie about public key crypto is not far away, and might be made before all the developers die and are canonized for institutional portraiture. What a hoot Sun's PR release about Whit's elevation to a poster boy for corporate security. And, not to be overlooked in the rush to commercial, institutional grade exploitation, fuck Bruce Schneier for saying PGP will endure for a niche market. What the smell of money will do, slathered with personal envy of the genuine creators outside the world's beltway.
