Cryptonomicon

Throughout history, making codes and breaking codes has changed the world landscape. I believe none more so that the WW2 breaking of the German Engima codes. The Enigma was a machine that the German military used to communicate and was thought by the German leaders (a deranged vegetarian lunatic and an opium addicted blob) to be unbreakable. Its chances of repetition was 1:158,962,555,217,826,360,000. That's a big number. Some awesome dude named Turing came up with a way to break the codes made by Enigma using a machine called the Bombe. The only working one is at Bletchley Park where we decided to visit for a hot second. It was very cool to see such a neat piece of history.