Colin Burke

The Other Memex: The Tangled Career of Vannevar Bush's Information Machine, the Rapid Selector.

Vannevar Bush had much less to do with modern information science and technology than has been thought. The histories of the two machines that were the closest Bush came to turning his famed Memex ideas into hardware, the Comparator and the Rapid Selector, dictate a reevaluation of Bushs direct influence. His 1930s attempts to build a device for Americas codebreakers and to create a machine for the library of the future were less than successful. The story of the difficulties of the decades‐long projects help to place Bush and Memex in an historical context.

A rough road to the information highway. Project INTREX: a view from the CLR archives

In the mid-1960s, Americas richest library foundation sponsored a far-reaching and very expensive attempt to redefine the library and its technology. The Council on Library Resources, along with other foundations and agencies, supported the near decade-long INTREX Project at MIT. The Council on Library Resources was the only large-scale foundation committed to the general purpose library and it was directed by librarians and others interested in the humanities. But INTREX was not by or for the general library, even the general research library. Rather, the project was shaped and run by engineers and was oriented to the needs of the engineering and applied science communities. Much to the disappointment of the council and its science advisors, INTREX produced little and did not establish the basis for the hoped for fundamental changes in library methods and technology.

The US Bombes, NCR, Joseph Desch, and 600 WAVES: the first reunion of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory

The code-breaking activities of the British Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park have dominated our understanding of the secret war to infiltrate the message system of the German forces in Europe between 1939 and 1945. This is the story of the US Navys response to the need to gain intelligence to win the battle of the Atlantic in 1941 and 1942, the competitive development of mechanical code-breaking systems known as Bombes, and the contributions of NCR engineer Joseph Desch and 600 Navy WAVES (Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service).

Review of American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989 by Thomas R. Johnson

This multi-volume highly-classified history of America’s National Security Agency received attention in leading newspapers as soon as its release in redacted form was announced in 2008. It deserved such notice. Its comprehensive coverage of the subject, the skill and devotion of its author, and the research and writing that took close to ten years of full-time effort have yielded a foundational work. American Cryptology should be consulted by anyone interested in the history of communications and signals intelligence and by those concerned with the history of America’s broader intelligence establishment during the years of the Cold War, 1945–1989. Even with the many redactions to the three (of a total of four) volumes, which were released under an FOIA request, the work is an informative and definitive statement—and it will spark further research into the many historical issues it raises. It will also stimulate historical debates. Significantly, as of December 2008, the three volumes are available, for free, at the web addresses cited above. Johnson’s effort is the first in-house, over-all history of the agency. The goal of his project was to synthesize the specialized histories that had been written within NSA and other intelligence agencies, the many interviews with leading figures in the intelligence community, some archival research, and general historical works. The mandate Johnson worked under was to create a balanced view of NSA’s administrative-political and technical history, one useful for providing NSA’s personnel with the historical context of their work. That goal was achieved and more. His volumes stand as a resource for independent scholars and a fascinating reading for the general public. What the work was not intended to be is also important. It was not to be focused on cryptologic methods nor was it to be a listing of crypto-systems attacked and

From the Archives: Codebreaking (or not) in Shanghai

Abstract A United States OSS document gives a personal view of the failure of German codebreaking activies in occupied China during World War II.

Evolving traditions: From ‘documentation’ to ‘information science & technology’

This invited panel session will engage the audience through presentation and discussion of the work of three scholars representing a broad trajectory of career accomplishments. The work of these three individuals has been selected in order to showcase the breadth, depth, and richness of Information History in celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Review of The Secret Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid

This new work is the most complete and scholarly commercially published comprehensive history about the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and its allies’ achievements and failings since the end of World War II. Concise but lively writing enhances this heavily researched and unusually well documented chronological narrative of what the agency had to confront as its customers ordered it to focus on the Soviets, then the ‘‘third world’’ and then international terrorism while it was facing increasingly crypto-skilled adversaries, as well as difficult-to-overcome changes in communications technologies. The work contains informative short sketches of NSA’s administrators and their policies, as well as useful insights into the significant higher-level political and legal decisions that determined what resources the agency had and what the government allowed it to do to fulfill its missions. It aptly describes the sometimes unproductive relationships among the NSA’s constituent organizations, as well as the agency’s complex interactions with its customers and other intelligence agencies. This study’s evidentiary base is strongest for the years between 1945 and the 1980s, but near a third of the work surveys the major intelligence events of the last twenty years. It is in those sections that the volume’s evidence is less compelling. The author begins by drawing a picture of NSA’s vastly downsized predecessor agencies in 1945, which were nevertheless able to intercept and decrypt an enormous amount of significant Soviet communications while at the same time breaking the secrets of the Venona traffic about Soviet agents in America. According to Aid, a spy brought that near miraculous ‘golden age’ to a close in late 1948, just as the Cold War began. After that ‘‘Black Friday,’’ when the Soviets started changing their crypto systems, American and Allied radio-intelligence endured a Dark Age for more than two decades, during which little high-level information about its major target, the Soviet Union, was produced. What signals intelligence about the Red nations there was came from traffic analysis, intercepts of unencrypted data, telemetry, and decrypts of other nation’s messages. Amplified by its failure to warn of the coming of the Korean War, the agency’s lack of product left it with few supporters, and at times, it faced severe threats to its budgets and even its existence. Yet, the author had to admit, signals intelligence remained the best source of intelligence available.

From the Archives: A Lady Codebreaker Speaks: Joan Murray, the Bombes and the Perils of Writing Crypto-History From Participants' Accounts

Abstract A declassified 1970s article by Joan Murray, the World War II–Cold War British codebreaker who worked on the German naval Enigma problem, and who was engaged to Alan Turing, gives some new insights into the battle against the U-boat Enigma. As important, in the light of documents released by the British and the American since the 1990s, the article shows the ganders in using a participants memories as final evidence. Although privy to the secrets of Bletchley Park, Murray was, for example, unaware of the near equal power of Englands own four-wheel Bombes compared to those designed in America.

A gracious but tragic special ultra message

The military-diplomatic context is provided for a recently discovered, critical and most-secret February 1944 message from Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt concerning the loss of hundreds of British lives due to the American bombing of a German prisoner-of-war train during the Italian campaign.