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Before. http://www.codesandciphers.org...

The work that the code breakers at Bletchley park did prevented a lot of Ally deaths. When the Germans instituted using the 4-wheel enigma it was impossible to tell what the U-boats were doing out in the Atlantic Ocean. Because of this, supply boats going to the U.K. were being sunk at a high rate, unable to avoid the U-boats, eventually the Brits could have been forced out of the battle (no war supplies == no war). Near the end of 1942 however, some documented daily settings on the new 4-wheel enigma were pulled off of a sunken U-boat in the Mediterranean allowing german naval deciphers to be broken. Through the man-power, knowledge, and tools available at Bletchley, they could decipher and relay german naval messages (at least in the Atlantic) to high command often within hours of obtaining them. After this, supply ships in the Atlantic were nearly invisible to German U-boats. The monthly settings booklets still had to be retrieved to continue this, but through missions and sometimes luck most of them were captured

That's the WWII side of the story (or at least a very small part of it).

The importance to /. is probably that this war was the first time machines were used to cipher messages, and thus machines had to do the deciphering. To break the regular ground enigma's daily settings scientists at Bletchley designed and manufactured the Colossus(es). If you ever see this thing run, especially the interior mechanisms, you'll know this was a great unknown leap towards multi-purpose computing machinery. Unfortunately because of U.K. laws, the work and knowledge of those at Bletchley couldn't be released until sometime in the 80's (I think)

How about http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/anoraks/lorenz/t ools/index.htm a Virtual Colossus *ON* a beowulf cluster?

The claim probably comes from this incident:
(quote)
A simulation of Colossus which Sale ran on a top-of-the-range Pentium PC took twice as long as the real thing.

or this:
If you wanted to program a modern computer to do what Colossus does, you'd need a 2GHz Pentium to match it.

Don't forget Colossus was massively parallel:
At 5,000 cps the interval between sprocket holes is 200 microsecs. In this time Colossus will do up to 100 Boolean calculations simultaneously on each of the five tape channels and across a five character matrix.

The fact that Colossus existed was heavily guarded until Winterbotham's book (about 1974) so the remains were carefully destroyed as were most records of its construction. However Tony Sale managed to reconstruct it based on notes obtained from the original designers including Tommy Flowers as well as interviews.

Hi, for some detailled info on how they broke Enigma, you should visit Tony Sale's website http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ Tony is walking computer and Wartime history! There a nice section on how to break enigma: http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/anoraks/index.ht m . You also get a crash course enigma and cryptology. more links related to Enigma can be foud here: http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/links.htm

Hi, for some detailled info on how they broke Enigma, you should visit Tony Sale's website http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ Tony is walking computer and Wartime history! There a nice section on how to break enigma: http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/anoraks/index.ht m . You also get a crash course enigma and cryptology. more links related to Enigma can be foud here: http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/links.htm

Sorry hit 'submit' not 'preview'! The link is http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.h tm

http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.h tm/ The Colossus celebrates its 62nd birthday this year. Another case of Yankees trying to re-write history! It's bad enough when Hollywood get away with it for 'artistic reasons' but /. and CNet should know better... :-)

At least it isn't as if someone like the Poles broke it first.(http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp /poles/poles.htm)

It's inexcuable for the frelling SS to have been sending sensitive documents around in unencrypted emails.

The SS? Don't these guys use Enigma? :p

They did break the first version, it was later upgraded with an additional wheel, and that upgraded one was cracked by Turing at Bletchley. A few links: http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/ poles.htm, http://www.armyradio.com/publish/Articles/The_Enig ma_Code_Breach/The_Enigma_Code_Breach.htm, http://www.enigmahistory.org/enigma.html. This and other Polish contributions to WWII were kept quiet at the end of the war to avoid annoying Stalin, and it was carried into history writing (especially in the UK) for a long time. Too many exaples to mention, the Enigma is but one...

Driven by Leak TL12 valve(US=tube) monoblocks they sound unbelievably realistic. I feed them with several source components including the shuttle I have in the living room.

Even computers used valves once! http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/colossus. htm

Here is a link for Alan Turing and his work on ciphering and enigma machines.

Tony Sale's webpage - WW II Codes and Ciphers is well worth a visit also.

The colossus is interesting in a few respects.

The first being that it was somewhat, but not completely programmable. It was well suited for cracking german ciphers, and could be modified to account for changes in the encryption schemes.

The second was that it was fast. Very fast. Granted, it suffered from a von neumann bottleneck. The computers typically operated at 1,000 charatcters per second. One of the designers tested the limits of the machine and found that it could reliably work up to 8,000 characters per second before the paper tape would catch fire from the friction. This sort of speed went unsurpassed for decades -- perhaps even into the 80s.

Thirdly, it was small. Tiny compared to ENIAC. All 10 fit into one (albeit, rather large) room.

Last, it had almost no influence upon later computers. After the war, Churchill ordered the cryptologists to cut the machine into "pieces no bigger than a man's head". However, as all government secrets go, it wasn't held quite well, and someone successfully builttheir own colossus.

It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers.

Actually, it was a bit more subtle than this. For a long time after the second world war the Allies were sitting very firmly on the knowledge that they'd broken the German code systems, and made no serious attempt to prevent the German engineers from going off to work for other countries. In consequence ... up until the 1960s or 1970s Britain and America had easy access to tools that could break almost any diplomatic or military cipher in use around the world. Meanwhile, these German engineers and ex-military were going around the world touting this system "which had remained secure through WW2". Yeah, right. And many people believed them.
Of course, since the original work that actually broke the Enigma code system was done in Poland, the Russians had found out that Enigma was broken. So they sold it to their client states, for exactly the same reasons.

Oh, you'd forgotten that the breaking of the Enigma system was done in pre-War Poland? That's OK - the people at Bletchley Park haven't forgotten.

Interesting links :
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/ is a site by some of the people who worked at Bletchley Park.
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ is the official Bl.Pk. website. Shame they still haven't got any photos of the approach roads - it's a bit of a pig to find, even if you can navigate your way around Milton Keynes. I think they're trying to encourage visitors by train.
http://www.retrobeep.com/ is a link into the computer museum at Bl.Pk.

Colossus would however easily crack Enigma (sic) codes quicker than your over-clocked P4.

In Appendix 1, Sale notes: "as a result of this decision (to use Javascript) the programs are BIG and the simulation runs slower than the original Colossus. (about one second with a 600Mhz PC to scan and process 2,000 input characters, original Colossus, 5,000 characters per second)". Clearly an implementation written in a decent language running on modern hardware would be several times (possibly as many as 10 times) faster than the Javascript simulation and therefore faster than the original Colossus.

Funny thing about slashdot - people seem to think they know all about hardware because they know the difference between a MHz and a GHz.

Colossus would however easily crack Enigma (sic) codes quicker than your over-clocked P4.

In Appendix 1, Sale notes: "as a result of this decision (to use Javascript) the programs are BIG and the simulation runs slower than the original Colossus. (about one second with a 600Mhz PC to scan and process 2,000 input characters, original Colossus, 5,000 characters per second)". Clearly an implementation written in a decent language running on modern hardware would be several times (possibly as many as 10 times) faster than the Javascript simulation and therefore faster than the original Colossus.

Funny thing about slashdot - people seem to think they know all about hardware because they know the difference between a MHz and a GHz.

This page has a description of the machine.

Turing didn't invent the machine. The germans did.

Colossus was not used to crack Enigma it was built to crack the Lorenz machine (a high security teleprinter cipher). One of the interesting things was Bletchley Park was able to build a Lorenz machine without ever seeing a real one!

Here is a dirty great quote from here

The first intercepts

The teleprinter signals being transmitted by the Germans, and enciphered using Lorenz, were first heard in early 1940 by a group of policemen on the South Coast who were listening out for possible German spy transmissions from inside the UK.

Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park, took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name Fish. The messages which (as was later found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as Tunny. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner.

Because the Vernam system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages.

The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of didn't get that send it again.

They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same machines generating the same obscuring characters same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first.

The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER message number in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on.

The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two

Colossus was not used to crack Enigma it was built to crack the Lorenz machine (a high security teleprinter cipher). One of the interesting things was Bletchley Park was able to build a Lorenz machine without ever seeing a real one!

Here is a dirty great quote from here

The first intercepts

The teleprinter signals being transmitted by the Germans, and enciphered using Lorenz, were first heard in early 1940 by a group of policemen on the South Coast who were listening out for possible German spy transmissions from inside the UK.

Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park, took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name Fish. The messages which (as was later found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as Tunny. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner.

Because the Vernam system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages.

The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of didn't get that send it again.

They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same machines generating the same obscuring characters same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first.

The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER message number in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on.

The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two

Now what would be cool is to build the vacuum tube based machine the allies used to crack various codes...

The bombe was the first significant such electo-mechanical device used by the allies. Based on the Polish Bomba, incidentally.

Later they turned to Colossus, thought by many to be the first true computer.

Both are being rebuilt at Bletchely Park by a team of volunteers. Very cool, in my opinion.

maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma, and have a mini-WW2 cryptography battle on your computer!

Tony Sale the expert who rebuilt Colossus has also created a Virtual Bletchley Park part of his website which includes a Virtual Colossus that you can run via the web. However it is recommended to read the instructions (PDF) first!.

maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma, and have a mini-WW2 cryptography battle on your computer!

Tony Sale the expert who rebuilt Colossus has also created a Virtual Bletchley Park part of his website which includes a Virtual Colossus that you can run via the web. However it is recommended to read the instructions (PDF) first!.

maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma, and have a mini-WW2 cryptography battle on your computer!

Tony Sale the expert who rebuilt Colossus has also created a Virtual Bletchley Park part of his website which includes a Virtual Colossus that you can run via the web. However it is recommended to read the instructions (PDF) first!.

maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma, and have a mini-WW2 cryptography battle on your computer!

Tony Sale the expert who rebuilt Colossus has also created a Virtual Bletchley Park part of his website which includes a Virtual Colossus that you can run via the web. However it is recommended to read the instructions (PDF) first!.

This page explains Enigma fairly well.

How can you say a machine built in 1943 came before one built in 1937-42. That's at least one year earlier.

Just imagine, for example, a similar effort devoted to computer technology, circa 1955

The timeline starts only at 1945. That misses things like Colossus which is a decent candidate for first electronic programmable (UTM) computer.

Funny you mention that NOVA program. The Lorenz machine had the stroke of luck that day with the double keyed ~4000 char transmission with diffs that became the first break in its design. Newmanry History Hedley

You want a geek charity? Give something back to the country that built (arguably) the first modern computer. Send bottles of Evian to Yorkshire Water and help them prepare for the suprise of next summer.

Yorkshire Water Services Ltd.,
PO Box 306,
Bradford,
BD1 5SU