Editing Cryptonomicon (section)

====Historical figures====
Fictionalized versions of several historical figures appear in the World War II storyline:
* [[Alan Turing]], the cryptographer and computer scientist, is a colleague and friend of Lawrence Waterhouse and sometime lover of Rudy von Hacklheber.
* [[Douglas MacArthur]], the famed U.S. Army general, who takes a central role toward the end of the World War II timeline.
* [[Karl Dönitz]], [[Grand Admiral|Großadmiral]] of the Kriegsmarine, is never actually seen as a character but issues orders to his U-boats, including the one captained by Bischoff. Bischoff threatens to reveal information about [[Nazi gold|hidden war gold]] unless Dönitz rescinds an order to sink his submarine.
* [[Hermann Göring]], who appears extensively in the recollections of Rudy von Hacklheber as Rudy recounts how Göring tried recruiting him as a cryptographer for the Nazis: Rudy delivers an intentionally weakened system, reserving the full system for the use of the conspiracy among the characters to locate hidden gold.
* Future United States President [[Ronald Reagan#Military service|Ronald Reagan]] is depicted during his wartime service as an officer in the [[United States Army Air Corps|U.S. Army Air Corps]] Public Relations branch's 1st Motion Picture Unit. He attempts to film an interview with the recuperating and morphine-addled Bobby Shaftoe, who spoils the production with his account of a giant lizard attack and his harsh criticism of General MacArthur.
* Admiral [[Isoroku Yamamoto]]'s 1943 death at the hands of U.S. Army fighter aircraft during [[Operation Vengeance]] over Bougainville Island fills an entire chapter. During his fateful flight, the Commander-in-Chief of the [[Imperial Japanese Navy|Japanese Imperial Navy]]'s [[Combined Fleet]] reflects upon the failures and hubris of his [[Imperial Japanese Army|Imperial Army]] counterparts, who persistently underestimate the cunning and ferocity of their Allied opponents in the [[Pacific War|Pacific Theatre of Operations]]. As his damaged transport plane completes its terminal descent, Yamamoto realizes that all of the Japanese military codes have been broken, which explains why he is "on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk."
* [[Albert Einstein]] brushes off a young Lawrence Waterhouse's request for advice. During his year of undergraduate study at Princeton, Waterhouse periodically wanders the halls of the [[Institute for Advanced Study]], randomly asking mathematicians (whose names he never remembers) for advice on how to make intricate calculations for his "sprocket question," which is how he eventually meets Turing.
*[[IBM 7950 Harvest|Harvest]], an early [[supercomputer]] built by [[IBM]] (known as "ETC" or "Electrical Till Corp." in the novel) for the National Security Agency for cryptanalysis. The fictionalized Harvest became operational in the early 1950s, under the supervision of Earl Comstock, while the actual system was installed in 1962.