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About the Book
It's surely weird to connect Al Capone to the Medal of Honor, but the connection's there in front of us. The Prohibition-era rum runners bring us to Elizebeth Smith Friedman who solved Enigma during World War II with pencil and paper. She, in turn, left us a secret in plain sight, on her headstone in Arlington National Cemetery. That secret waited decades for another woman to notice.
Friedman and her husband, William F. Friedman, bring us to the National Security Agency (NSA) and its predecessors. The NSA's needs included Top Secret "Task 13," the first stored-program digital computer. The NSA's role in creating digital computers was not acknowledged until 67 years later in July 2017. It's time we knew!
Ed tells this story from his personal perspective--because he's in it.
About the Author
Edward W. Barnard brings unique implementation expertise from programming Cray supercomputers at the hardware level, debugging systems at classified facilities, and solving critical Y2K infrastructure problems. His 20+ years at Cray Research included hands-on work with assembly language, operating systems, and I/O subsystems. He has published over 100 technical articles, helping developers implement solutions to complex problems. His cross-domain experience, from NSA troubleshooting to Saudi Aramco installations, provides practical insights into applying advanced problem-solving techniques across diverse technical environments.
Edward has transferred his skill of bare-metal programming the Cray I/O Subsystem (with only 131,072 bytes of local memory) to novel ways of managing Large Language Model token context windows, unlocking capabilities not yet taught in AI literature. When a skill dormant for 35 years becomes suddenly relevant again, he calls this The Time Travel Pattern.