BLUEMOMENT

Not sure how it compares with 'puters, but the Bowmore Enigma 12 yo is my current favourite airport buy at £43.98 for 2 litres...

I saw something on telly years ago, well maybe 5 yreas ago, and it was saying how good the Bletchley Park machine was to crack the code in <24 hrs. Ok they had a good guess at some of the settings but it was cogs and valves.

The top spec PC of the time would have taken a couple of weeks IIRC, certainly too long. Although the modern PC could do many more computations per second, it's a jack of all trades so isn't as eficient as the old jobbie.

The Bletchley machine could only do one job, but it did it rather well considering.

There is a rather nice little piece in this weekend's FT about Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, who created the Collossus computer in January 1944 that was used, post-Enigma, at Bletchley Park to crack enemy codes.

Link = http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8a94a76c-b3ac ... ab49a.html.