8 Cyberpunk Machines That Changed Computing Forever

6. Alan Turing’s Bombe (1940)

Altair 8800
Antoine Taveneaux / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

With 10 miles of wiring, 108 rotating drums, and weighing 1 metric ton, Turing’s code-busting computer was a beast. More than 200 Bombes were built to decipher the German Enigma machine. They helped shorten the war and saved thousands, perhaps millions of lives.

A genius and a hero, often under-resourced and not always taken seriously, Turing never gave up. He even proposed building a Universal Machine that could compute just about anything!

If you’re looking to buy a Bombe, sorry, you’re out of luck. They were destroyed soon after the war and only a few dummy replicas exist.

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