Cryptologist and proprietary file formats – Thomas Jefferson and the Wheel Cipher
Developing for proprietary file formats is much like breaking codes or being a Cryptologist. Cryptography is a very interesting study, dating back to the Greeks usage of transposition ciphers, but surely was used long before that by Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Thus it was with interest that we read this WSJ article titled, “Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code” about this man who broke a 200 year old coded message sent in 1801 by Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to then-president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who has patents and inventions which included the portable copy press, also dabbled in secret code (The Wheel Cipher):
“Jefferson even wrote about his own ingenious code, a model of which is at his home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. Called the wheel cipher, the device consisted of cylindrical pieces, threaded onto an iron spindle, with letters inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Users could scramble and unscramble words simply by turning the wheels.”
SOURCE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html
What more creative way to kick off your Monday morning graphic designers, publishers and print professionals than with this little invention history from one of the founding fathers of the United States!
In closing, please do not forget that Markzware does what many have said is the impossible; allows you to preflight via stand-alone applications many desktop publishing proprietary formats and now even search and be able to extract that content which is rightfully yours. Surely Mr. Jefferson would agree.
