Was the VM a failure?

[Torsten]

Regardless of the intention behind the VM, what we can say for sure is that it's creation process wasn't a success story that was frequently repeated. 

In some cipher systems, especially those based on substitution or transposition, "filler" sequences are deliberately inserted to obscure patterns or irregularities in the plaintext. These fillers make the message harder to decipher without the correct key.

A historical example comes from World War II:
"These practice messages contained a short text at the beginning and were filled out to average length with dummy text."
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Generating such dummy text by reusing fragments with small alterations was a practical, low-effort way to produce large amounts of plausible-looking content, without the mental strain of inventing every sequence from scratch.

D'Imperio (1978, p. 31) describes this as a natural approach for generating pseudo-text:
"The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of such dummy sequences, would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions to fill out the line until the next message-bearing word or phrase."

Note, also designers sometimes modify Lorem Ipsum text by copying nearby words and changing a few letters to create longer filler text that looks structured but is ultimately meaningless.

Today, of course, we have automated Lorem Ipsum-style text generators that serve the same purpose — producing structured, filler text that looks convincing but carries no real meaning:
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