VMs: The VMS encoding production line hypothesis...?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Anyone who was able to create a coding system of this complexity and 
subtlety must surely have been in high demand. But the (apparently) 
unprecedented size of the VMS would make its production a very 
cost-ineffective activity for a (excuse the lapse into MBA-speak) high 
value-add "lone gunman".

Also: one of the most cost-effective ways in which Quattrocento ciphers 
were broken was simply by holding a big, sharp knife to the throat of the 
person who composed (or carried out the cipher's encoding or decoding), and 
simply asking them nicely. I guess that this was why we don't read much 
about the code-makers of the day - like modern Witness Relocation Programme 
participants, they probably tended to try to keep quiet about their day job.

So, here's another possible angle on the VMS' production which might help 
solve both of these issues at the same time - the coding production line.

I've already hinted at a possible division of labour between encoder and 
scribe: and the single-stroke design of the VMS' cipherbet makes it seem 
likely to have been designed for the benefit of the encoder, which I have 
already suggested points to some kind of value-chain asymmetry (ie, 
presumably the encoder's time was more valuable than the scribe's).

But perhaps, for a fairly significant endeavour like the VMS, this is 
thinking too small: perhaps an encoding production line would have been the 
most appropriate way of proceeding. Note that this isn't so unlikely - at 
roughly the same time (circa 1500 or so), Trithemius set up a production 
line for making wax tablets, with the sequence of tasks divided much the 
same way as Adam Smith described several hundred years later for pin 
manufacturing.

The kind of encoding production line I'm describing might well be an early 
instance of the industrialisation (ie sequentialisation through 
specialisation) of knowledge production (as opposed to many monks doing the 
same job in a scriptorium in parallel) - but the VMS, if they are in fact 
coded, would be an early instance of a industrial-scale pure knowledge 
artefact, so this should perhaps not be so surprising. Even in scriptoria, 
ornaments and embellishments were done by separate craftsmen, so there has 
always been some aspect of job specialisation in manuscript production.

So, my idea here is of a sequence of knowledge workers applying a series of 
processing stages to a text on a large number of wax tablets, handing the 
final product of the process on to a scribe to write onto vellum. If none 
of them knew the whole coding sequence (just the part they were responsible 
for), there was no danger they'd individually be able to blurt out the 
secret at knife-point (or even to endanger the project by getting drunk 
with someone inquisitive).

I also suspect that copying the diagrams onto the vellum was done by a 
different copyist, at much the same time (hence text-first in some places 
and drawing-first in other places), in an order depending on how things 
were going. It's a big activity to organise, but given enough wax tablets, 
will-power and money, I think it could all complete fairly quickly.

Obviously, there's a danger that I'm projecting my comp-sci conception of a 
Turing Machine onto the VMS' production process: but I can't help but see 
the VMS as the product of an algorithmic process - the more I see under the 
skin of the coding system, the more this seems true to me.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....


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