Randy is paging his way through the opening sections of the Cryptonomicon , but he can never concentrate when he’s on an airplane. The opening sections are stolen pages from World War II-era military manuals. These used to be classified until ten years ago, when one of Cantrell’s friends found copies just sitting in a library in Kentucky and drove there with a shitload of dimes and photocopied them. That got public, civilian cryptanalysis up to where the government was in the 1940s. The Xeroxes have been scanned and OCRed and converted to the HTML format used for Web pages so that people can put in links and marginal notes and annotations and corrections without messing with the original text, and this they have done enthusiastically, which is all very well but makes it hard to read. The original text is set in a deliberately crabbed, old-fashioned typeface to make it instantly distinguishable from the cyber-era annotations. The introduction to the Cryptonomicon was written, probably before Pearl Harbor, by a guy named William Friedman, and is filled with aphorisms probably intended to keep neophyte code-breakers from slapping grenades to their heads after a long week of wrestling with the latest Nipponese machine ciphers.