For sale: an Enigma machine | Hacker News Reader

For sale: an Enigma machine

christies.com

45 pointsepo30 comments

Also, the next lot is even more exciting: Some offprints of Turing's papers and manuscripts, formed by Prof. Maxwell Newman, guide price 300 to 500 thousand pounds! Apparently these are extremely rare; none have appeared in auction for 35 years!

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?from=sal...

This entire collection is eclectic and interesting. There are the Turing papers, the Enigma, ENIAC related papers, the old Apple I, some original Warhol and Matisse (for what seems like a low price), original documents from Captain Cook on his travels and a rare first edition of Adam Smith's Wealth.

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?from=sal...

I'm surprised this hadn't had more attention here!

APPLE-1 -- Personal Computer. An Apple-1 motherboard, number 82, printed label to reverse, with a few slightly later additions including a 6502 microprocessor, labeled R6502P R6502-11 8145, printed circuit board with 4 rows A-D and columns 1-18, three capacitors, heatsink, cassette board connector, 8K bytes of RAM, keyboard interface, firmware in PROMS, low-profile sockets on all integrated circuits, video terminal, breadboard area with slightly later connector, with later soldering, wires and electrical tape to reverse, printed to obverse Apple Computer 1 Palo Alto. Ca. Copyright 1976

Wow! a the Apple-1 is estimated to go for £100,000 - £150,000

I wonder if there are any artifacts from todays companies that we should be grabbing up

Now I see why - it comes with the optional cassette interface and BASIC on a tape :)

Seriously it is an exceptional artifact: original invoice (Salesperson: STEVEN) and a typed note from Steven Jobs explaining how to hook-up a TV and keyboard: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/ZoomImage.aspx?image=/lot...

I can imagine one of the 1st gen iphones fetching a few quid down the line.

I noticed that if you keep on looking through the lot they have watson's and crick's original paper on DNA http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?from=sal...

There's a fundraising drive trying to get together the money so Bletchley Park, the museum dedicated to the work of Turing and the other codebreakers at Station X during the war, can buy the offprints and keep them for public display. More info: http://www.justgiving.com/turing-papers/

I hope a museum gets it, but I think it will probably go for much more than the estimate.

By the way, any UK HNers should definitely try to get down to the museum at Bletchley park and the national computing museum. Geek heaven :)

edit: wow, they also have the first published ENIAC patents: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?from=sal...

Visitors might want to be a bit patient on the guided tour - largely seems a waste of time initially, with the guide talking a lot about the history of the land/park itself, and the WW2/code-breaking info being somewhat superficial.

Then he takes you into the National Museum of Computing and demonstrates the machines, and sometimes lets you touch and feel as well - awesome! The guided tour ends on quite the high!

depends on the guide I guess, I've been there about 4 times (used to live just down the road, and the ticket is for a whole year!) and took the tour twice, the code-breaking content wasn't highly technical, but it was covered in a decent amount of depth I felt.

Riddle from the tour: What must you add to nine to get six? (and no, it's not -3)

replying in case someone years from now reads this:

Gur nafjre vf f. avar va ebzna ahzrenyf vf vk, nqq na f naq lbh trg fvk ;)

I went there on my last trip to the UK, and had a chance to talk to a 92 year-old gentleman who had helped build some of the machines during the war, and had been involved the project to reconstruct the Colossus machine.

There isn't the huge throng of visitors and high security like at other museums. I was able to walk behind the cordon and get a up-close view of a running Colossus machine.

It feels like a place with living history, and I highly recommend visiting!

Edit: There is no shortage of Enigma machines in museums, by the way. I know there are ones at the NSA museum, the Imperial War Museum in London, and Bletchley Park has several. If someone wants their own for home use and they can afford it, I am all in favour of that.

I live quite close to Bletchley Park; we used to go on school trips there when I was a kid. :)

One day, I'd like to have a library like Jay Walker's to add this to. He's even got a Sputnik in there, along with his Enigma.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker...

Bay Area folks who've read down this far, you'll absolutely love the Computer History Museum, http://www.computerhistory.org

That would look nice on the living room cupboard, but you can't beat this one for glamour: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/tvv1/pht10.html

Perhaps someone here will be able to decrypt that encoded Haiku...

I was interested in the many manuscripts in that sale. I wonder if Google would buy them, scan them and resell them ... they could buy through a third party/anonymous bid and only release the scanned copy after the resale to avoid a negative effect on price.

Amazing piece of kit that would be great to own - but what would /you/ do with one?

You could probably gut it and put an Arduino inside of it that played MP3's.

With all due respect, wouldn't that be a little like upholstering your couch with the Bayeux Tapestry? While the Enigma machine isn't exactly one of a kind, it is quite rare and has a great deal of historical significance.

Sorry, I had a feeling the sarcasm in my initial post wouldn't fully come through :)

I probably should have gone with the steampunk-themed comment I was originally planning.

Janestreet uses an Enigma as a prop to make their New York office look better.

convert it to a keyboard

30-50k pounds. Shit thats a high price.

You think? I wouldn't have been surprised to see it fetch twice the high estimate. It's got appeal to people interested in:

Computing

Codes/Ciphers

WW2

That's pretty broad appeal. I mean even if it was only of interest to Turing fans that's still a huge market, and Turing fans are only a small subset of those larger markets.

Just my opinion, I've no idea if these things come up fairly often or not.

It may still fetch more, but honestly that doesn't change that it is a very large amount of money.

> that it is a very large amount of money.

Compared to what?

People pay 100K$ for rocks which have no intrintrinsic value.

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

I was thinking it was low but Wikipedia says (so it must be true!) that they pop up at auction from time to time and have fetched $20K

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