[time-nuts] are any time-nuts also random-nuts?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Wed Dec 23 19:26:25 UTC 2009


In message <0F83896E292444AFA019E8589F9C7700 at vectron.com>, "Bob Camp" writes:
>Hi
>
>If you do a Google for SIGTOT you head off to another bunch of people who
>hook RNG's up to various things. My *guess* is that they likely hooked one
>up to a computer back in the 1940's...

Interestingly, this does not seem to be the case.  It was thought about
at various points, but everybody reached the same conclusion: too slow,
and went with PRNG instead.

>As far as I know, the first RNG to be connected to a computer was this
>one:
>	http://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/DASK_rng.pdf

The danes reached the same conclusion, but not until after they actually
built their device...

Poul-Henning

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.



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