Date: Fri, 5 Apr 85 09:15:32 est
From:: Walter Hamscher
To: *ht at ht, *mc, *oz at oz, *xx at xx

REFRESHMENTS: Noon
PLACE: 8th Floor Playroom
HOSTS: Sundar Narasimhan, Harry Voorhees, Dave Siegel

      			 1941-1985:
	    FORTY-FOUR YEARS OF AN MIT TRADITION

		      	  :-) (-:

Today's annals of computer science seminar will focus on
recently discovered documents concerning two anonymous US
Navy cryptographers (both MIT '40) stationed at Pearl Harbor
in December of 1941.  On the evening of December 6th, 1941
an encoded Imperial Japanese Navy transmission was
intercepted.  The decrypted text began:

	"The attack on Pearl Harbor of December 8th..."

The attack being two days away, the MIT cryptographers
decided to call it a night and decrypt the remainder of the
message in the morning.  The rest, of course, is history.

	     REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED