Explosive Knowledge: Cryptology in the 20th Century

In August 1960 the Pentagon announced that William Martin and Bernon Mitchell had not returned from vacation and said “there is a likelihood that they have gone behind the Iron Curtain”. On September 6 they appeared at a joint news conference at the House of Journalists in Moscow and announced they had requested asylum and Soviet citizenship. They revealed that they had worked for the National Security Agency (NSA). In this way the mission and activities of the NSA were made public for the first time [1]. Although these activities are much more wide-ranging than cryptology, this post will only be concerned with that small part.

All branches of knowledge had vigorously developed in the first half of the 20th century. All of it had been sustained by what I like to call a conversation: an open exchange of knowledge in books and journals. Before World War I this was also true for cryptology; afterwards, traffic on that channel fell silent. By the end of the 20th century the cryptology conversation was intense, wide-ranging, and immensely productive of innovations, of which bitcoin technology is but one example. In this post I trace the chain of events that led cryptology from its dark age, which lasted from 1918 to 1967, to its renaissance. My material is obtained, unless otherwise noted, from Crypto, a book by Steven Levy, published in 2001 [2].

Children of the Miracle: from Algol to Prolog

The appearance of Fortran inaugurated a fruitful period in programming languages that was to last until the early 1970s. When, in 1999, E.W. Dijkstra gave the keynote address at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing in San Antonio, Texas, he gave an overview of what he saw as the large-scale trends in the preceding half century. I quote:

And then the 60s started with an absolute miracle, viz. ALGOL 60. This was a miracle because on the one hand this programming language had been designed by a committee, while on the other hand its qualities were so outstanding that in retrospect it has been characterized as “a major improvement on most of its successors” (C.A.R. Hoare).
…
Several friends of mine, when asked to suggest a date of birth for Computing Science, came up with January 1960, precisely because it was ALGOL 60 that showed the first ways in which automatic computing could and should and did become a topic of academic concern. [1]).

Algol was a miracle as a language. It was short-lived, but it left a momentous legacy that acted in two ways: in the way the Revised Report on Algol 60 describes the language and in the way subsequent language designers were influenced by being shown what a programming language could be. In celebration of Algol 60 I refer to these designers as “Children of the Miracle”.