It’s rather astonishing to think that with all this computer power at our disposal in the 1980s, we used it to play Pac-man and Seven Cities of Gold.
I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext.
On the other hand, what were we going to do with a few messages sent by U-boat commanders to the German naval command forty years beforehand?