Another little known story in the history of computers relates the work of the government boffins in World War II Britain, Turing included.  Turing made a major contribution to the development of a sophisticated computing machine called the Colossus which was used to help crack the codes of the German Enigma Machine.  The story didn’t come out till the 1970s because it was top secret, for obvious reasons.

You can read more about cryptography in a fascinating book written by Simon Singh:  THE CODE BOOK.  The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking.

Those of you interested in learning more about cryptography and even using cryptography to protect your privacy can work your way through our tutorial on PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which you will find available free of charge online at http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/PGPintro.htm.