parrhesia.com

Almost 10 years ago, I requested a copy of Turing’s Treatise on the Enigma from the National Archives & Records Administration via the Freedom of Information Act; when I received it, I only had a flatbed scanner, and sheet-fed scanners were either prohibitively expensive or aggravatingly unreliable, so these 119-odd pages of cryptographic history languished unpublished on the Web, at least in their original form. (A painstakingly retyped version is available at http ://f.home.cern.ch/f/frode/www/crypto/Turing/.)

Happily, technology and bandwidth have become cheaper in the intervening years, and I now lease office space that includes a modern copier that can scan to PDF as easily as making a photocopy.

Thus, I can now make the original images (as received from NARA) available online at http ://parrhesia.com/turing.pdf. (The link has been CORALized for faster response.)

It’s tough to read because this is a scan of a photocopy of a photograph (microfilm?) of the original - but if you’ve ever wondered what Alan Turing’s handwriting looked like, or want to remember what it was like to produce a document before White-Out existed, here you go.