The Cryotron Files

I'd never heard of Dudley Buck, or his Cryotron before, but found the combination of technology and Cold War intrigue irresistible. In a time before Moore's Law, when computers depended on large, unreliable vacuum tubes, Cryotrons seemed to offer a possible route to smaller computers and, crucially, to ones that would fit into the body of a missile.

A photo of Buck on the cover of the book shows him holding a vacuum tube in one hand, while a tiny Cryotron is barely visible in the palm of the other. Although Cryotrons were smaller than vacuum tubes, the equipment required to keep them at low enough temperatures for them to act as superconductors offset much of their size advantage. So even if Buck had managed to get his Cryotron working as he'd hoped, it's likely it still would have lost to the economies of scale made possible by silicon based transistors.

Yet, even if the the Cryotron itself was a technological dead-end, it seems many of the techniques that were developed for its fabrication would have been useful in other areas. If he had lived longer, who knows what impact he would have had, or what other technologies he might have developed. Co-written by Buck's eldest son Douglas, the book seeks to put Dudley in his rightful place among the pioneers of the computer era.

We'll probably never know whether he was assassinated, or whether his death was caused by illness, or poisoning from the chemicals he was working with. I found the assassination theory put forward in the book unconvincing, but given the frequency and flippancy with which the act was committed during the Cold War, it's certainly not impossible. Somehow, I doubt the Kremlin would ever allow any records they might have to come to light.

With all the technological developments that have taken place since the events in the book, a couple of passages stood out, the first on page 44;

The concept of computers did not sit entirely comfortably with some of the veteran codebreakers, who had broken Japanese ciphers with sheer brainpower.

It seems unbelievable now, to be breaking ciphers without the use of a computer, but I would imagine that the ciphers in use at the time were very different to the modern state of the art. What they didn't know of course, was that the British had been using computers to break German encryption back in the forties. It's worth noting though, that they were using the computers to brute force the encryption keys. Uncovering how the encryption worked and spotting vulnerabilities was still the work of humans - and maybe it still is?

Then, on page 96;

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, a prominent philosopher and linguist at MIT who was at the vanguard of a group who believed that any language could be translated by machine if given enough data.

This seems a remarkably prescient prediction of LLMs, some seventy years before their invention. It was clearly understood to be a data problem, but one that couldn't be overcome with the technology available at the time.

If, like me, the intersection of spies, technology and the Cold War is an interesting area, then keep an eye out for The Cryotron Files, by Iain Dey and Douglas Buck.