Slashdot Mirror
Rebuilding Colossus
mclock writes "I've just been to a website claiming that the British Colossus was the first computer :
"As 1996 was the 50th anniversary of the switch-on of ENIAC I made sure that Colossus was rebuilt and working in Bletchley Park, just as it was in 1944. There has been a stunned silence from across the water!" See the excellent site for the full story on the rebuild of Colossus in 1996." We've done a couple pieces on ENIAC before, and recently had the declassfication of Colossus 2 info. Like I said in the earlier ENIAC piece, there's a lot of debate as to the first machine: The German's had Zuse, US with ENIAC, Britain with Colossus. Me, I'm going with the abacus.
"As 1996 was the 50th anniversary of the switch-on of ENIAC I made sure that Colossus was rebuilt and working in Bletchley Park, just as it was in 1944. There has been a stunned silence from across the water!" See the excellent site for the full story on the rebuild of Colossus in 1996." We've done a couple pieces on ENIAC before, and recently had the declassfication of Colossus 2 info. Like I said in the earlier ENIAC piece, there's a lot of debate as to the first machine: The German's had Zuse, US with ENIAC, Britain with Colossus. Me, I'm going with the abacus.
But even before that, Konrad Zuse built the Z1 in 1936, that also used relays and read input from punched film.
Larry Gonnick's The Cartoon Guide to the Computer has some interesting info about this history.
Which of course, being a mechanical device, was held back for hundreds of years by YeOldeAmazon.com's one-clunk patent.
Sure, there're plenty of moron's using computers, that's their choice. Kids arent the problem, eliteists like you are. You shun anyone who lack a peice of knowledge... get over yourself. When you started out usin computers, you were just as much a moron as the next guy, but you (i assume) learned, and now have the knowledge. Instead of bein a damned commie about your knowledge, share it. Teach the kids what BIOS is, teach them why AOL bites, and get off the damn high horse
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
>the only people who should have computers are programmers and sometimes scientists
and what point would there be to only programmers having computers? to write programs for other programmers perhaps?
if you don't care about the article then don't bother replying just to tell us that we shouldn't care either. if its all the same to you, i'll decide for myself what i do and do not care about. thank you very much. please drive through.
How does the Colossus do on Quake timedemo?
:)
semantics are everything!
Debate about whether Colossus was a 'real computer' (was it reconfigurable, stored-program, Turing complete, etc) should understand the wartime context.
My uncle was a tech (not a 'boffin') working on Radar in the UK at about the same time. He told me that the 3 priorities they had were...
1. It should work.
2. It should be finished yesterday.
3. It should use only standard off-the-shelf components.
There were LOTS of improvements that the boffins and techs knew they could make, but with bombs raining down on cities nightly, delays caused by making up custom components were just not acceptable.
I assume the same sort of priorities applied to Colossus. It was not an academic excersize, it was a code-breaking project, of vital military importance. National survival was at stake. If you could make it general-purpose in 3 days, or hard-wire it in an hour, well you bloody-well hard-wired it!
The bottom line is, Colossus worked. It did the job of automating what would otherwise have been an impossibly laborious calculation process. That makes it a computer in my book, arguements about technical trivialities seem pretty pointless.
As for whether Colossus was 'first', and whether the various pre-Colossus machines (at last count, Russia, Poland, USA, and Germany all have pre-Colossus claimants to the title) were 'computers' - well, I'll leave that to people who know something about those machines. I don't.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Ha! LOL! Well, Atanasoff was never a tee-totaler, so why should his machine be either!
Why clutter up one's sentences with all that punctuation stuff anyway?
I wish I had more data. By no means am I one of those "the ancients of atlantis" or "alien mystery" sort of fools, [clearly, modern society is humanities highest point of technological achievment ever]...
But, I saw something about two months ago on the history channel, and it has been a curiosity of mine ever since to try to find additional data on it.
According to the show [whose accuracy I could not wholly vouchsafe], some acheologist had expressed interest in a find from an ancient greek shipwreck that had been langouring on some dusty shelf in a wharehouse... Anyway, to make a long story short, he x-rayed it and 'found' it to contain gears and a complicated internal mechanism for performing certain astronimical calculations.
I posess no expertise in ancient history, but I was doubtfull, as I didn't think the greeks had even had gears. But, as it was on an ostensibly educational program, it made me wonder. Was this the first computer?
Anyone with any additional info on this, as I must admit to a strong curiosity...
--
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
The US CENSUS had some machine that they used in the 1920's I think or 1930's... can't remember what it was called but it was used to tabulate the census
;)
It was the Hollerith Tabulator..
I don't know if it really fits the criteria, in that it was essentially a complex counter that did very little outside of simple addition to accumulators. The operator still performed the read operation and there was no real 'recall' outside of reading the dials..
Still, Hollerith's firm went on to provide the nucleus to Big Blue.. So the question begs...
... Where's the Linux port for the Hollerith Tabulator? If Perl can be ported to a manual typewriter...
Your Working Boy,
From the article: "Colossus is so fast and parallel that a modern PC programmed to do the same code-breaking task takes as long as Colossus to achieve a result!"
If this claim is accurate, then it just goes to show how remarkably good the machine was at solving the problem in hand.
It also makes you wonder about how fast a dedicated code-breaking machine would be nowadays.
In other news, Steve Jobs announced that, compared to the Colossus, the G4 is "twice as fast" using standard 1944 Bytemark benchmarks.
These results are somewhat suspect, as the only suite the Bytemark software was able to run after loading into the Colossus consisted of timing the paper tape speed of repeated "hello world" s.
The Mac G4 was twice as fast updating "hello world"s on the desktop, the analogous suite.
Life,
Rademir
The GPL is like making adultery illegal: a net loss of individual freedom for a net gain in morality.
If the law is silly enough to let people lock code in a box, then it seems complementary (if not fair) to let people lock their code out in the open.
ourpla.net is your planet
I think the thing that really impressed me when I last heard about it was actually the tape reader. It was reading punched paper tape so fast the paper was snapping... The reader could run faster, paper couldn't. In 1944. Wow.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I don't think you can consider the ABC as a computer because it wasn't Turing-complete. Zuse's machine /was/ and would be my choice for the first computer, even though it wasn't solely electronic.
:)
Of course, the actual candidate is very subjective, but I can't see how the ABC could be considered a true computer. Unless you're an Iowan of course
---
Okay, who gets title of first computer is obviously one fuzzy decision (the implicit question, what capabilities are necessary & sufficient?).
When/what are the contenders for the first command line interface?
Life,
Rademir
ourpla.net is your planet
Regenerative-memory is not a technical merit of modern technology, it is just a necessity. The Z1 is completed in 1937 which IRC is the construction-begin of ABC. It even employs real binary floating point encoding, whereas ABC used binary fixed point encoding.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
The debate is about a few things. One of them is bragging rights.
:)
Colossus was the key to cracking the other German code, which was based on the Baudot code. Unlike their German counterparts on land, the Navy was on the ball and knew that the cipher had weaknesses. They had books, which were printed red on pink paper, which had all the transmission codes. (These were the 'secret keys'.)
This also meant that, unlike the Army's use of Enigma, there was no 'initial marker' which could be cracked to determine the key to encode.
For enigma, they had a machine which was able to, with the application of human know-how (meaning: because of the way enigma worked, you could tell which letter was excluded from the possible space, excluding 1,951 possible starting patterns.
The two Colossus machines were designed by a post-office engineer.
This was for bragging rights, plain and simple. ENIAC was two years after Colosssus, and the reason ENIAC was given credit was because that was unclassified.
(Colossus was hidden until the 70's.)
And one more thing: Colossus' speed was limited by the speed of input. It was set to 5k cps to prevent injury
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Err, the "story" is written, not the computer.
Hmm...I don't know if regional humor works on Slashdot.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Also in contention for the distinction of being the first digital computer is the Atanasoff-Berry Computer built at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. Supposedly, Atanasoff conceived the plan of the machine drinking bourbon in a roadhouse bar somewhere in Illinois in 1937.
In 1973, after a lengthy court trial, a federal judge declared the Eckert-Mauchly (Eniac) patent invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the first digital computer. It should also be noted that it was the first digital computer to use dynamic RAM. Lots of good information on the ABC and many more links can be found here and also here. Photos and diagrams can be found here.
If one closely examines this period of history, they find that it is a time that is just chock full with all kinds of convergences between mathematics, physical science, engineering and materials technologies that make the digital computer almost inevitable. After all, this is a device that had been conceived of, at least in part, as early as the Victorian age and the birth of the industrial revolution. Really, it was just a matter of time before somebody produced a working model, and as so often happens many people took different paths to the same end.
For Those who haven't had to chance to discover it, and for those who may get nostalgic about it, here is a link to The Story of Mel from the Hacker Folklore section of the Jargon Dictionary.
that aside, Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts (named for founder Lee Berk) doesn't have a psych department. Berkeley in California might, although their Music Dept, it seems, does not even list such a class
Of course, we all know about the importance of the japanese to pearl
;-)
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
- ENIAC:
...has been called the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer in the world [Burks, Burks 81]. ... It solved its first problem in December 1945 ...
- Mark I:
... built by Howard Aiken at Harvard University between 1939 to 1944 ...
- ABC:
... The machine built by John Atanasoff (later called the ABC) at Iowa State College from 1938 to 1942 used vacuum tubes, but was restricted to the addition and subtraction of vectors and had an structure inappropriate for universal computation[Burks, Burks 88]...
- Z1:
...programmable automaton built from 1936 to 1938 ... In direct contrast to these three machines, the Z1 was far more flexible and was designed to execute a long and modifiable sequence of instructions contained on a punched tape. Zuse's machines were not purely electronic and were of reduced size.
Furthermore, it resembled in design to current cpus (ALU, Registers, PC, Memory, binary). I'd say Zuse surely built the first computer, although considering Charles Babbage, I wouldn't call him the inventor. BTW, who invented the car?"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Man, you'd think after blowing all my moderator points modding up references to the ABC at Iowa State on the story last week, Hemos would know better.
I guess after posting stories nobody bothers to read the comments?
To summarize:
The ABC was the First Electronic Digital Computer.
It had several signifigant advances which directly relate to modern day computing:
- Regenerative memory
- Binary(base-2) number system
ENIAC used a decimal(base-10) number system, not binary.
ENIAC was signifigant as a large general purpose computer. Colossus was signifigant as a large code breaking computer.
But the designation of First Electronic Computer belongs to neither.
Steve
Iowa State Alumni, Computer Science
One has to wonder if thhey are going to be pulling "old" P3's and Itanium's (if they aren't delayed until then!) out of some old storage room, assembling them and seeig if they still work for nostalgia's sake..
(Of course one has to wonder if anyone will still be here in 50 years)
ENIAC weighed 30 tons, used 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1500 relays and required 200 kilowatts to operate. And, wasn't the first modern digital computer the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (the ABC, built between 1939 and 1942 on the Iwoa State University campus?
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed, but his Difference Engine was. Oh, not by him, but by a dedicated crew of Brits about ten years ago. The complete mill, ready to roll (literally), is on display in the Science Museum in London.
The funny thing about this is that the machine's whole purpose was to eliminate typos in the gunnery tables prepared for the military. To that end, the mill was to connect directly to a printer, to print the tables without human intervention. Babbage's printer was not built. Instead, sensors come out of the mill. Sitting where the printer would be, on a pedestal, is...a laptop.
Words fail me to describe the crushing sense of irony I experienced when I saw this.
Um, I know it's a waste of electrons responding to trolls, but ...
I think you'll find the brits never held SW Africa (aka Namibia).
It went straight from German control (pre WWI) to South African control (post WWI), and after a long and bloody guerilla war finally achieved independance sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.
#define TROLL_MODE_ON
The USA couldn't even hold The Phillipines, Palau, Vietnam, or Panama, to name a few. Hell, they're struggling to hold Puerto Rico (and parts of LA)
#define TROLL_MODE_OFF
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Actually Babbage *did* have a working Difference Engine which he had installed in his living room to impress the visitors (and hopefully attract some venture capital), although he never built the laptop^H^H^H^H^H^Hprinter.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I have to agree with this.
I toured Colossus (from the inside out, as I mentioned in my post on the recent declassification story), and as far as I could gather, the machine was not designed to be reconfigured in any way. It was a five-channel search engine for correlations in an input tape, typed out the correlation coefficients on a typewriter using solenoids, and that was that. No reconfiguration possible.
If you demand that a computer be programmable, I don't think Colossus qualifies. On the other hand it's one damned impressive piece of hardware, no argument there.
So this is my market for that pile of hard vacuum photocells that I've had sitting in the garage since 1952.
didn't ENIAC and Colossus take up a VERY substantial amount of energy?
So, does this one still want to talk to Goliath?
John
In other news, Steve Jobs announced that, compared to the Colossus, the G4 is "twice as fast" using standard 1944 Bytemark benchmarks.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
but then, someone with a testosterone overdose will get into it "yes we were!", "No we were", etc.
[sigh]
Let's just give credit where it is due....
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"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When will Linux be ported to it?!
The Analytical Engine!
All Hail Ada! (not the language, llamas)
First "First Computer" Post! ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
It's history you nitwit.
It's important to have 'relics' like this that actually work properly, or at the very least actually exist. In a couple of hundred years we're going to have very little to remind us of this era, as we bulldoze, landfill, and recycle everything in sight. (At least in the US)
Blech. Signatures.
I had to look it up:
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
Atanasoff made a presentation at University of FL (his alma mater) once that I attended. He said that he was trying to work out a way to solve differential equations automatically He took a long drive one night, and ended up at a roadhouse just across the Iowa/Illinois line (that part of Iowa being dry then). It was there, over his drink that he worked out the key details.
See http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml for more info.
It can't be that hard, it's only ones and zeros: http://onesandzeros.tangozulu.biz
The ABC wasn't programmable. In my book, if it ain't programmable, it ain't a computer.
In a display on the Iowa State Campus, they have a copy of one of the original memory drums from the ABC. They weren't able to determine the internal wiring without disassembly, and didn't want to risk damaging the original, so they took the original drum to a hospital and ran at scan. This this image, the internal wiring could be decifered, and the duplicate made
The University of Manchester (where I am a student) claim to have invented the first "stored program computer". The SSEM (known as the "Baby" to it's friends) was invented in 1948 and used a CRT screen as memory.
More info at The Manchester Baby site.
the only people who should have computers are programmers and sometimes scientists
If only scientists owned computers, there would not be a great need for programmers either you fool. The only programmers would be a bunch of guys working for universities writing code in assembler. Even your "eliteness" wouldn't get you a job in that market.
it is in that crappy perl language which makes programmers lazy
Perl is good because it can get the job done quick and easy. It doesn't make programmers any lazier, they just get the job done at less cost. most people that write in perl also can code in other languages, but they recognise the fact that there is a better tool for the job.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
The paper tape reader on Colossus runs at 5,000 characters per second.
The feeder holes provide the machine's clock.
Anthony E Sale is Hon FBCS ex Museums Director, Bletchley Park (the person who saved the historic Bletchley Park buildings from demolition and was the single greatest force behind making it into the fascinating cryptography museum it is today)
Here is the blurb:
" Allied cryptographers in Bletchley Park had an enormous impact on WW II. Tony Sale will first describe how the German Enigma cipher was broken, first by the Poles, and then by the code breakers in Bletchley Park using the remarkable contributions of Alan Turing. He will then discuss the breaking of the German Lorenz code with the Colossus, the world's first large electronic computer.
He will also relate some of the many anecdotes about life in Bletchley Park, which had 250 people in 1939 but exploded to 12,000 people by the end of the war.
Tony Sale has had careers in electronics, intelligence (with MI5), and (since 1963) in computers. He started the Bletchley Park Museums and the Colossus rebuild in 1993, and was Museums Director until 1999. He has lectured and written widely on the history of cryptography and computers, appeared on television, and served as a consultant for ``Breaking the Code'' and the soon-to-be-released film version of Robert Harris's book ``Enigma.''"
Tony will also be giving a talk on "Tackling 10^20 size search spaces with pencils, wheels, wires tubes: Code breaking in WW II " at MSRI in Berkeley on the 20th. (this will be a technical talk for mathematicians and cryptographers)
I think he will also be doing some speaking at Stanford..but I don't know when or where..
Collossus should be a damn sight heavier than
the Enigma machine. So it should be harder to
kidnap. (one would hope)
I dont understand what the debate is. None of these computers was the first. To find the first true example of a computer you have to look at Babage's machine. Sure, it was never completed -- but that's perhaps the most important quality it had -- it was also the first example of vaporware!
Since Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer, shouldn't the machine she wrote for be considered the first computer?
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
s/marijuan/marijuana/
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Iowa State had the ABC (Atanasoff/Berry Computer) in 1939. ENIAC's designers based part of their work on the ABC, and in fact the ABC was central to the voiding of some of UNIVAC's (the commercial offspring of ENIAC) patents as the outcome of a 1973 court decision. Many people credit John Vincent Atanasoff as the father of the electronic digital computer.
Ancient Greeks had coin operated vending machines in year 25 bc -- her e is a page describing that. A vending machine has states,just like a Turing machine. A Turing machine can do anything a digital computer can do.
On the other hand the question should be who created the first digital computer with an electronically stored program, and then the answer would probably be the English, because unlike Colossus other machines of that time did not have stored programs.
computer. If I have it right, the American machines were very easy to
reconfigure machines, that performed computations from an electronic
memory, but their instruction set was not Turing complete. The Zuse
machine had a Turing complete instruction set, and so would get my
vote for first computer, but it wasn't until the Bletchley machine
that code and data resided in the same memory space, which is of
course a very important aspect of modern computer design.
Choose your criteria to get your favourite machine to win...
I believe that the first computer was one that stored data, called it back, and was able to even perform basic tasks. In the modern day enviroment it is used very often in mission critical situations, and is excellent at multitasking. It does catch viruses but these viruses are diagnosed and destroyed with anti-virus utilities.
I have decided that since no one else has I will claim patent on it.
The human brain
On a more serious note:
It really depends on what you call a computer. The US CENSUS had some machine that they used in the 1920's I think or 1930's... can't remember what it was called but it was used to tabulate the census. It had some real basic name also.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Yeah right! just like Americans invented Cars, nuclear power, TV and so on... Americans are the descendeants of people who where thrown out of the decent countrys in Europe hehe
this message printed on 100% reusable electrons
I went along to a similar talk that Tony Sale gave in London a couple of years ago.
He's fascinating. Don't miss it. Speak to one of the driving forces behind rebuilding Colossus. When they started the rebuild they had something like seven photos of the room. Tony has spoken to many of the remaining people alive who originally worked on colossus during the war, the people who were part of breaking the enigma codes.
Rather than rebuilding the vacuum-tube behemoth they should just write an emulator and release it under the GPL. Then we can all have our own colossus in an Xterm :-)
..or was it Al Gore?
And here I was getting all excited thinking that someone was going to rebuild the Colossus of Rhodes - now that would be cool.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In a similar spirit, here's an extract of a story of microcomputers written by a Belgian guy.
1973: First French microcomputer of the world.
1974: First microcomputer of the world (the reader is kindly reminded that only the realizations from the USA are allowed to compete).
Just because I'm not old-school like yourself means I don't deserve a computer? What about CAD users? They've mastered a complex package yet don't need to know what a BIOS is.
Or how about engineering? I use my computer to simulate airfoil surfaces. You want me to do this by hand? You don't want to see how many trees I'd kill doing so...
I know what a bit and BIOS are, and yet I don't program much (I know C and FORTRAN, and that's about it), I'm certainly not a scientist, and if all I want to do is finish up my AAE 251 homework and play some Quake, does that mean I don't deserve a computer?
Hey! Maybe this wasn't one of those asinine "First Posts"!
It was posted in response to an article over what was the first electronic computer; perhaps there's a computer aout there dating to the early 40's or to the 30's named "Post". In that case, the terse message of the AC is that the "1st" was "Post", not ENIAC or Colossus.
On the other hand . . .
Steven E. Ehrbar