The Code Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

Kahn, David

ISBN 10: 0684831309 / ISBN 13: 9780684831305

Published by Scribners, New York, 1967

About this Item

Bound in perfect grey cloth with black backstrip and bright silver titles and decoration to spine, this 1997 Revised Edition is VG in VG wrapper (unclipped). XV111/1181pp with Prefaces, A Few Words, 27 Chapters, Bibliography, Notes to Text, Notes to Illustrations, Numerous Photos and Tables plus Index. Massive tome in VG condition!

Seller Inventory # 0012124

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Code Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet
• Publisher: Scribners, New York
• Publication Date: 1967
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684831309
• ISBN 13: 9780684831305
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: Revised Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers—how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage—updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.

Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.

About the Author

David Kahn, a recently visiting historian at the National Security Agency, is the world's leading expert on the history of cryptology, and the author of Hitler's Spies, Seizing the Enigma, and Kahn on Codes, as well as articles in numerous popular and technical journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern History from Oxford. An editor at Newsday, he lives in Great Neck, New York.