For many years, Alan Turing was one of the lesser-known heroes of World War II. Born in 1912, he rose to prominence at Cambridge in the early 1930’s where he was eventually elected a fellow of the King’s College. Much of his work on computability, or whether or not a problem can be solved and the most effective methods of going about it if it can, is now considered 101-level stuff in comp.sci programs around the world. At the time, however, this work was revolutionary. Turing is best known for the hypothetical Turing Machine, a computing device …

Someone in Italy has a real German Enigma machine from World War II up for auction on eBay. The Enigma machines were the mechanism used to implement the famous cryptosystem that protected German radio communications up until Allied cryptographers were able to figure out how it worked. With today's technology (in particular, programming languages) it isn't too difficult to implement one yourself once you know the principle, but if this is legit, it's a real piece of World War II and crypto history. Not many Enigma machines survived after the war was over; the few that are left are in …