Colossus has been Rebuilt

Max Driver writes "In celebration of D-Day, "Colossus", one of the earliest electronic code-breaking machines, has been rebuilt after ten years of effort by computer conservationists. Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher. This story is being reported by the BBC. Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC."

Comments

The Forbin Project

[Seumas]

Phew. For a moment, I thought they were talking about this Colossus.

An artificially intelligent supercomputer is developed and activated, only to reveal that it has a sinister agenda of its own

Re:The Forbin Project

[DrEldarion]

When I first saw it, I thought they were talking about THIS colossus and I was very confused.

Re:The Forbin Project

[frobnoid]

Then you're not nerdy enough. Go watch Colossus: The Forbin Project a couple of times.

Re:The Forbin Project

[Anonymous Coward]

After I saw that one a few years ago, I thought that it should be required viewing for every manager and developer to demonstrate what happens when you put a system online without adequate beta testing.

That computer was one supreme asshole; it made HAL look like a girlscout.

Re:The Forbin Project

[Dachannien]

When I first saw it, I thought they were talking about *this* Colossus.

Colossus of Rhodes

[The Original Yama]

When I read the headline I thought it was about the Colossus of Rhodes!

This is cool too :)

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[Borg453b]

My thoughts as well. I must have been playing too much civ :P

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[ComaVN]

Yeah, good for trade, but that is obsoleted by electricity, so why would anyone want to build that now.

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[Hittite Creosote]

In a sense, they already have. There is only a limited range of designs that are possible (and the drawing of it standing with legs apart is not one of them), so what it would have looked like would be a statue, legs together, one arm raised, at the entrance to a harbour. In other words, like the Statue of Liberty. Except not as big.

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[JeffTL]

And in fact, I believe that some ancient sources may represent it as holding a torch, though I could be mistaken.

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[Ubergrendle]

For those of you non-gamers, this is a joke refering to the creation of the ancient wonder "The Colossus of Rhodes" in the computer game Civilisation. There are specific in-game bonuses provided to the player who owns a city with this artifact until another player invents electricity.

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[monkeyman_67156]

Because it gives you an awesome boost in trade early in the game and allows you to gain an advantage over the other civs in terms of gold and science. Electricity comes so late in the game I don't know why you WOULDN'T want to build it.

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome to /.
act like you've been here before

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd build it early on, but we discovered electricity 150 years ago, why rebuild it?

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[meringuoid]

You'd build it early on, but we discovered electricity 150 years ago, why rebuild it?

Because most of the big modern-era city improvements cost more than an ancient-world wonder anyway, and it'll be good for the final civilisation score?

(sigh)

[Lobo_Louie]

... and the IRS still uses it to this day.

Re:(sigh)

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Not only that:

[...] the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC.

... but any day now some geek will announce that he's porting Linux to it.

Fantastic

[RTPMatt]

And just try to implement DRM!
not a chance baby! ;)

Reminder:

[JessLeah]

It only matches the speed of a modern PC at the single task it was designed for. Think of it as a very old, very interesting DSP. (I recall the stories on SlashDot about how the GPUs on modern ATI/nVidia cards are "many times faster than P4s"... well, yes, but you can't run Linux on them...)

Re:Reminder:

[noidentity]

It only matches the speed of a modern PC at the single task it was designed for.

Yeah, they're still trying to figure out how to make it crash as often.

Re:Reminder:

[Short Circuit]

I recall the stories on SlashDot about how the GPUs on modern ATI/nVidia cards are "many times faster than P4s"... well, yes, but you can't run Linux on them...

To elaborate:

GPUs still only run at a couple of hundred of MHz, but their dedicated circuitry allows them to perform certain matrix calculations much faster than x86 chips currently do, even with vector instruction extensions like MMX and SSE/SSE2.

Here are a couple of links to relevant articles. (1 2)

Re:Reminder:

[The Original Yama]

They had to wait for Bill and Paul to "develop the first programming language" before that was even possible.

Re:Reminder:

[Anonymous Coward]

Paul Allen and Bill Gates create and sell their first product. Inspired by an article in Popular Electronics magazines, Allen and Gates develop a BASIC computer language for the Altair 8800.

Are you capable of reading English? I don't see that claiming to be THE first programming language. It might be THEIR first programming language.

Re:Reminder:

[hype7]

GPUs still only run at a couple of hundred of MHz, but their dedicated circuitry allows them to perform certain matrix calculations much faster than x86 chips currently do, even with vector instruction extensions like MMX and SSE/SSE2.

Which is why Apple and soon Microsoft with Longhorn (if they ever get around to shipping it) will be using graphics cards for a select number of display compositing tasks.

It frees up the CPU, and can do it wayyy faster.

-- james

Re:Reminder:

[gowen]

Err. I am:

Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language

Thats what it say, verbatim, (in the mid-70's section)

Re:Reminder:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are you capable of reading English?"

Are you? You're looking at the wrong section, moron.

Re:Reminder:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm. Gee. In a paragraph about the Altair 8800 you'd think perhaps the context of "For the Altair 8800" wouldn't need to be put into every sentence so some clueless /.er wouldn't try to take it out of context...

Yeesh

Re:Reminder:

[Jeremy Erwin]

The quartz compositor treats each window's content, and each window as a openGL primitive. All Quartz Extreme requires is a certain amount of VRAM--32 is preferred, and the ability to support textures of arbitrary (not powers of two) height and width. As the Mac only supports a small number of video cards, this practically guarantees that a GPU will be available.

But the GPUs in early nVidia and ATI cards are fixed function anyway-- useless for all except computing Transform and Lighting. Later models (GeForce3, Radeon 8500) were programmable, but did not fully support floating point math. The latest two generations can theoretically be used for general purpose computing, but this is experimental, and only applicable to certain classes of computation.

Re:Reminder:

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Microsoft, but even I have to disagree with the veracity of your statement.

follow the link and you'll see:

1975 "...develop a BASIC language..."

That's A language, not THE language.

Re:Reminder:

[gowen]

In a paragraph about the Altair 8800 you'd think perhaps the context of "For the Altair 8800" wouldn't need to be put into every sentence so some clueless /.er wouldn't try to take it out of context.

No, you'd simply write "working on the Altair 8800 Bill and Bob made its first programming language".
It's called clear, concise writing.

Re:Reminder:

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the sentence in question: "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language, and begin an extraordinary, history-making journey."

What they should have said was, "Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language on the Altair 8800, and begin an extraordinary, history-making journey."

But they didn't say this, did they?

Re:Reminder:

[Psykosys]

So you can't watch pr0n on it?

Re:Reminder:

[bot24]

And how much more did this cost than my faster, three-hundred-dollar(GPU not included, that was almost as much) Athlon XP PC? The GPU can't do very much nongraphical stuff, but it could be used for some very complex ciphers anyway. You would need a very powerful computer to utilize that much speed. My graphics card(Radeon 9800 Pro) could encrypt large documents in a less than a second, but my PC would need to read the file off of the harddisk and then pass it through my AGP 4x(It was a cheap PC) bus, and then retrieve it(which is slower than sending it). I wouldn't really notice the difference between using my 1.9Ghz CPU and my 400Mhz(?) GPU.

That's a funny ad up there right now: "This is Freya with OSDN Marketing. She needs 1000 Slashdot readers to fill out this survey before we let her see sunlight again."

Clever use of what you have...

[jarich]

Just goes to show what can be done when you are clever about using what you have.

Re:Clever use of what you have...

[Analogy Man]

Neccesity is the mother of invention. If the fate of the world is at stake one can become very inspired.

The challenge for each of us is to find a way to change the world with what we do.

At the beginning of my career 14 years ago flying home from my first big interview I talked at length with someone on an airplane about a literature, travel, educational background etc. he summed up his career with "I sell sunflower seeds for human consumption" although someone needs to do it I suppose, sadly many of us spend more than half of our waking hours on occupations no more inspiring.

Re:Clever use of what you have...

[SteveAyre]

Actually, the ideas are always around.

It's just at those times the governments are willing to chuck as much money at any ideas that'll help them as they need to to get them to work.

In more peaceful times getting funding is like getting blood out of a stone.

Re:Clever use of what you have...

[Lodragandraoidh]

If everyone did only what inspired them, alot of the unglamorous products and services we take for granted would not exist, and everyone's lives would be less for it (of course, I could do without my MTV, and the endless wasteland of product differentiation...)

Some people don't have any aspirations beyond drinking beer and fishing, and no vision beyond determining what is for dinner. That is fine. Everyone has a purpose in the grand scheme of things, or if they don't, one will be issued to them at some point out of necessity. Perhaps raising children is their life's world-changing work, while their job is just that - a job to put food on the table. I know this might be a shock to you, but life does not have to center around your occupation; your occupation can be on the periphery.

The really free, self actualized people are the ones living under the highway overpass in cardboard boxes. The rest of us do the best we can with what we have, and what necessity dictates.

Re:Clever use of what you have...

[Analogy Man]

True, and as a father of 4 I do believe my raising emotionally healthy boys is of considerable worth. However, the point I was trying to make was that much of our time is spent mired in the mundane. Granted, someone needs to scrub toilets (like I did last night), but how much of the boring soul-less parts of our existance can we eliminate and replace with meaninful pursuits?

It would be nice to have an unsatisfying occupation "on the periphery", but since counting commuting is 10-12 hours per day, it is hard to marginalize it versus the 4 hours in the evening spent with children.

Re:Clever use of what you have...

[Anonymous Coward]

Neccesity is the mother of invention.

Nonsense...Patents are the mother of inventions. If we didn't have patents, nothing would be invented.

Re:Clever use of what you have...

[Lodragandraoidh]

Looking at this from a Buddist perspective might be instructive:

Dissatisfaction (or unhappiness) in ones life situation stems from several things:

1. Failing to recognize that 'self' is a fallacy - we are but transient beings, ever changing. "If the soul were permanent and unchanging--if all existence has its root something fixed--then change becomes philosophically difficult to account for (this is similar to Zeno's paradoxes)." (Wikipedia:Buddism)

2. Failing to recognize that "things are constantly coming into being, and ceasing to be. Nothing lasts." (Wikipedia:Buddism)

As a result "we desire a lasting satisfaction, but look for it amongst constantly changing phenomena. We perceive a self, and act to enhance that self by pursuing pleasure, and seek to prolong pleasure when it too is fleeting." (Wikipedia:Buddism)

Given the above, how much 'time' you spend in mundane activity is irrelevant. It is the quality of the experience, regardless of the content, rather than the quantity of time spent. If the experience decreases suffering, and thereby improves the lives of others, then you are on the right path - regardless of if you are cleaning a toilet, selling sunflower seeds, or doing something less 'boring'.

Finally, your suffering, and perhaps the suffering of others around you can be tied to one thing: your desires. Logically, you can do only two things to alleviate that suffering: remove your desires, or make different choices to satisfy those desires. If you value time with your family over material wealth, then find a job near home where your commute time is small to nonexistent - perhaps with shortened hours. If it is really important to you, you could probably find a job at home that would allow you to make as much or more than you make now. However, are you willing to make other sacrifices to accomplish that? How important is it to you, and would it make your family's life better in the long run? In either case, you may need to remove your desire for one or the other thing.

Ideally, we only need sustenance (food, water, shelter), and want for nothing else. In reality, we are beings with egos which makes such an austere lifestyle a difficult proposition. The Budda realised this, and found that the right path was the 'middle way', a balance between these opposing forces. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive, yet we see paradoxes that exist side by side in nature(i.e. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in quantum mechanics, and various optical illusions) all of the time. Freeing your mind of your desire, will then, paradoxically, allow you to focus on what is really important in your life - and illuminate your path forward.

* These are my own conclusions arrived at through study of basic Buddist principles - IANABM (I am not a Buddist monk).

good design

[millahtime]

Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC."

This definitely shows you what a good design can do. WIth all the advancement I expected that thing to be slower than my TI-89 calculator.

Re:good design

[Short Circuit]

It probably would be...if you tried to crack the same ciphers that the Colossus Mk2 was intended to break.

Re:good design

[AviLazar]

And your assuming that the TIs' are a good design? :)

Re:good design

[SoopahMan]

It is. As noted earlier, this machine was only good at its one task. If your TI-89 raced it in graphing x^2, it would win, and badly.

"Message was read at 5,000 characters per second. Could carry out 100 Boolean calculations at any one time."

A modern PC opening a large Word document processes hundreds of thousands of characters per second.

It would be cute to see the smallest possible "Colossus" with matching performance built with today's technology - you'd probably have to clock-down a transmeta-based palmtop.

Re:good design

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming that your spelling skills are pure shit.

Re:good design

[Psykosys]

Yeah, but TI-89's have buttons and for this you'd have to feed input through on toilet paper. There's also the slight issue of portability...

A tragedy

[sql*kitten]

From the article:

After the war, most of the machines were scrapped to protect their sophisticated secrets.

If the British Government hadn't been so short-sighted, the UK now would be the centre of the global computer industry. Aye, but they threw away aerospace too. Always, Britain invents, loses interest, and the rest of the world reaps the spoils.

Re:A tragedy

[Polkyb]

I saw a documentary on this a few weeks ago... Apparently, all the parts that went into making the beasties was "borrowed" from British Telecom. After the war, they just gave the parts back.

Re:A tragedy

[CdBee]

It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers. It still needed to be secret after WW2

Re:A tragedy

[Anonymous Coward]

And before that they failed to captialize on their discoveries in chemistry, leaving most of the chemical industry to the Germans (and you know what happened then).

Re:A tragedy

[eggoeater]

In one of James Burke's documentaries he talked about Britian basically "inventing" the fabric dying process (maybe in the early 1800s) but British industry never did anything with it. The Germans jumped on it and cornered the dying/fabric market, which bootstrapped their economy into the powerhouse it became until their defeat in WWI.
So it does seem the UK has a track record here...

Re:A tragedy

[meringuoid]

Apparently, all the parts that went into making the beasties was "borrowed" from British Telecom. After the war, they just gave the parts back.

Reminds me of something I heard about the Manhattan Project, which was a similar exercise in rounding up every geek in the country and making them do cool secret stuff... Apparently they couldn't get the copper wire they needed for the electromagnets used in refining their uranium, so they just took all the silver out of Fort Knox and made it into wire. Melted the lot down after the war and put it right back, no harm done...

Of course that makes me wonder what Auric Goldfinger was thinking of. America's loot stash is already radioactive! :-)

Re:A tragedy

[jdtanner]

Not the only thing us Brits have missed out on I'm afraid... The integrated circuit RSA encryption Doh!

Re:A tragedy

[Isofarro]

If the British Government hadn't been so short-sighted, the UK now would be the centre of the global computer industry.

From the article, to get around the reliability of valves the solution with Colossus was to leave it on until the end of the war, so it would have been on from 1 February 1944 through to at least 15th August (surrender of the Japanese). That's a 18 month uptime.

More uptime than the average Windows laden PC.

Re:A tragedy

[tehcyder]

Just being picky, but it would have been the Post Office back then. BT was founded in 1981.

Re:A tragedy

[Tore S B]

That, and packet-switched networks - Donald Davies invented it, almost at the same time as Paul Baran did in the US.

Yes, I am a history geek. ;)

Re:A tragedy

[Anonymous Coward]

We didn't really "miss out". The term "packet switching" was Donald Davies, after all.

Re:A tragedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Moronic attitude.

Destroying the machine would be exactly like destroying the facility and the plans to make the atom bomb, so that nobody can recreate them.

It would be a matter of time before other countries rediscover the atom bomb.

Interestingly enough, all advances in weaponry in England never were hidden and never disappeared. Long bows come to mind. They were used all the time, but the advances in computing didn't seem useful enough. Lack of imagination? Maybe they thought computers were only useful for deciphering and therefore they were not needed anymore, since the world was at peace.

Re:A tragedy

[Archibald Buttle]

Yep, Britain has a long and proud history of inventing things and then not capitalising on those inventions. Transistors, ICs, and LCDs were all invented in the UK, to name a few.

The UK is also the only country ever to have developed a rocket program capable of launching satellites and then abandon it. Clearly there's no strategic advantage in being able to put things into space. ??? For more info on this search for Black Arrow.

Re:A tragedy

[PapayaSF]

You're almost right. They did get tons of silver (not all of it) to make electromagnets (not just wire), which were so huge and powerful that when turned on, people standing many yards away could feel the pull on the nails in their shoes and on their belt buckles!

Re:A tragedy

[Bender_]

Transister
Invented by Julius E. Lilienfeld, 1924. German emigrant to America. This is an undisputed fact, he even has patents on it

ICs
Difficult to figure this out, but it is rather an evolutionary step from planar bipolar transistors. I think its fair to acknowledge the people who did the first working prototypes..

LCDs
No, Merck in germany developed the first liquid crystals. I dont know who the first person was who used it for displays, but afair it was an american.

Re:A tragedy

[Bender_]

Yep, Britain has a long and proud history of inventing things and then not capitalising on those inventions.

If you really want a good example for this, take Alan Turing. He was driven to suicide by british officials due to his homosexuality . And that despite his service for the country.

Re:A tragedy

[Dieppe]

More uptime than the average Windows laden PC.

Yes, but it didn't have to worry about becoming obsolete during that time either. ;)

Re:A tragedy

[RockDoctor]

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.

Re:A tragedy

[homunculi]

Actually fabric dying has been done for thousands of years. But synthetic dyes had begun to be invented in the late 18th century. Unfortunately since many of the dyes were nitrated compounds they made explosive fabric. In 1856 a Brit named William Perkins invented a colorfast purple dye called Mauvine which resulted in the color mauve. There were several Swiss, French and German companies that were also producing synthetic chemical dyes. By the end of the 19th century a large group of English and French dye manufacturers had gone out of business due to patent disputes leaving the field to the big three German companies; Bayer, B.A.S.F, and Hoechst. After WWI these three companies merged to form IG Farben, makers of Zyklon B poison gas as well as a host of expolosives and other chemicals for the war effort. and yes that is Bayer of aspirin fame. Anyway my point is that the Brits did not just give it up. . . there was a complex series of events that resulted ina superior German chemical industry and an inferior British one. . .

It matches the speed of a modern PC?

[bfg9000]

Jeez, here it comes -- someone's gonna tell me Colossus is faster than my Mac. Gentlemen, warm your PCs! It's BENCHMARK TIME!!!

Re:It matches the speed of a modern PC?

[bfg9000]

LOL! Love the brutally obvious mod bias here. Every time I even HINT at questioning the inflated speed claims of the Mac, I get modded down. It's obvious that the guys modding me down have no sense of humour about Apples whatsoever (*cough*paidshills*cough*). Hell, I though this was funny, insightful, true, and not mean-spirited at all, but the official Slashdot Astroturf team thought otherwise. Sales first, truth second!

As a Mac gamer, I can tell you that Macs really ARE in a game ghetto. Period. Even if the games are out there, they're a) ports that are rarely as good, and b) not available in a store near you. Order online and wait a few weeks -- at best.

I've learned a few good lessons here on Slashdot: I can flame RMS or Bill Gates all I want, but Steve Jobs is off limits. I can tell the truth about Linux useability or Windows viruses all I want, but Apple products are "hands off".

There's a pretty big bias, and sadly, it smacks of desperation. I can understand, with Apple being down to 1.7% of the market, their switcher campaign being a total failure, and new competition for the iPod on the way. I can understand WHY Apple fanatics would be desperate, but I don't support their desperate techniques. And yes, I'm a long-time Mac user, and yes, I love my computer, but to be perfectly honest, a young person "switching" based on the hype, propaganda, and "protectionist defenses of everything Apple" in this forum will be sorely disappointed. Because half of the stuff on here is VERIFIABLY NOT TRUE, and the moderation seems intent on suppressing dissent. Nice. Reading most posts, I'd think buying an Apple was a spiritual decision rather than a technological one. Jeezus, what a crock.

And NO, you mods can't hurt my feelings by moderating me down. This post is ASKING FOR IT, and do I care? No. I care that you're being unfairly critical, because you're doing a disservice to others, but personally, I don't give a goddamn. The more you mod me down, the less I promote Apple products in my own life and business, and the more I recommend something else to everybody who asks me. In short, you only hurt your "cause" by being a dickhead and attacking harmless jabs.

mange moi,
BFG9000

Re:It matches the speed of a modern PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the best -1 flamebati post ever. it totally doesn't deserve -1.

you're right when you say the mods are dickheads. they're just trying to sell product, get used to it

Free information.

[chuck54]

This to me illustrates the need for free information. If information about this machine had been made public in the years after the war, we may now have been a good few megahertz ahead of our selves in computer technology.

Re:Free information.

[meringuoid]

If information about this machine had been made public in the years after the war, we may now have been a good few megahertz ahead of our selves in computer technology.

I seem to remember hearing that a lot of Third World countries carried on using the German cryptosystems for a long time after the war, and that was why all the Bletchley technology was kept black - we rather liked being able to read everyone's mail. Don't know how true that is, though...

IIRC, GCHQ also invented the RSA cipher years before it was discovered in the civilian world. Damn shame we didn't get to cash in on that one :-)

Re:Free information.

[FraggedSquid]

At the end of the war, the British Gov gave Enigma machines out to various bits of the Commonwealth to use. I think that this is mentioned in Simon Singhs The Code Book, but I could be wrong.
Nobody in the outside world, not even the Germans(though some has suspected), knew that Enigma had been broken till IIRC the 1960's.

Re:Free information.

[ezzzD55J]

I seem to remember hearing that a lot of Third World countries carried on using the German cryptosystems for a long time after the war, and that was why all the Bletchley technology was kept black - we rather liked being able to read everyone's mail. Don't know how true that is, though...

Well, there is something related here; Dennis Ritchie dabbles in cryptography. He talks about cryptanalysis of the hagelin m-209b crypto device (I bought one on ebay :)). They submitted their findings for voluntary review by the NSA before publishing, and Ritchie was visited by a "Retired Man" from the NSA. The relevant bit:

He got a bit more specific about two things: the agency didn't particularly care about the M-209. What they did care about was that the method that Reeds had discovered was applicable to systems that were in current use by particular governments, and that even though it was hard to imagine that these people would find the paper and relate it to their own operations (which used commercially-available crypto machines), still... perhaps we should exercise discretion? It was certainly legal to publish, but publication might cause difficulties for some people in the agency.

Full story in the first link.

So, even though this has nothing to do with the UK and colossus/enigma/lorenz directly, it still is a similar story.

Re:Free information.

[raygundan]

Meh. That this device is "as fast as a modern PC" for the single task it was designed for is nothing particularly interesting. It is, as another reader pointed out, essentially just a large DSP. Just because a 400MHz GPU is many, many times faster than your 3GHz CPU at drawing pretty pictures, doesn't mean it's a better general purpose CPU. If you took all the millions of transistors in a P4 and made them all do NAND in parallel, you would have the world's fastest NAND gate, capable of doing a million near-instantaneous NANDs simultaneously.

This is not to belittle the achievement of the folks who built Collosus. It is, however, more correctly compared to things like the EFF DES key cracker, which like the Colossus was massively parallel. It was also a gajillion times faster than a PC *at the one thing it did*.

Re:Free information.

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to remember that the British government gave the German systems to members of the Commonwealth (eg Australia and Canada) after the war (but neglected to mention BP). They happily decrypted these 'foreign' governments conversations for a decade or two. Hardly cricket eh?! [Jon, Melbourne]

Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

I really put that down to two things:

1) Most people in England still only have 486 computers
2) He's talking about deciphering stuff off a paper tape, something a modern PC can't do at any speed
3) An old guy bragging about life's accomplishments (which is okay).

Don't get me wrong, this is a brilliant technical advance for the 1940's, but not even close to modern computer. This is really pandering to a British audience ("Look mates, at once time, we were the leaders in computer technology!")

Re:Not really

[rosbif]

Ah, the Dick Van Dyke theory of England (for those not aware, DVD played a cockney chimney sweep in the film "Mary Poppins", thereby setting back UK-USA relations a few decades)
1. Most people in England do not have computers based on 486s - I'd be surprised if it was more than 10%. I would suggest that low end P4s are in the majority
2. Any PC with a serial port can read a paper tape with a suitable paper tape reader attached (I've done this in the recent past)
3. Better than a kid whinging on about things that he doesn't understand.

BTW, I think you'll find "mates" to be an Aussie soubriquet, rather than an English one.

Re:Not really

[magefile]

3. Better than a kid whinging on about things that he doesn't understand.

He puts it down to two things? I think you mean, "3. Better than a kid who can't count whinging on about things that he doesn't understand."

Re:Not really

[Alan Partridge]

We WERE the leaders of all kinds of technologies before the great post war brain drain. When China or India become more attractive places to work than the USA, expect to see engineers leaving in droves from YOUR country too.

And we still have some pretty fierce and innovative engineering companies, you might want to think about that next time you do anything on a computer whos CPU is based on an ARM core.

Re:Not really

[arevos]

I really put that down to two things:

1) Most people in England still only have 486 computers
2) He's talking about deciphering stuff off a paper tape, something a modern PC can't do at any speed
3) An old guy bragging about life's accomplishments (which is okay).

At least we can count.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I hate when AC's mock the very flower of british technical prowness like that.

To think the entire british public has P4's. It shows the world how advanced we are! A lot of people still think we use Sinclairs (God bless Sir Clive), but most people in England, indeed in the EU are so advanced that if the Russians or Chinese would invade Surrey, it would change the entire technological balance of the world.

Did I mention that we invented GSM phones? Or the modern computer? The Beatles, James Bond, Julie Andrews, The Sex Pistols, Princess Charles, Tony Blair... the list is endless of what we as a nation have accomplished. While the sun may set on our geographic empire, the sun never sets on the British Technological Empire.

And if the goddamned scots would just leave, the place would be pretty much perfect.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people in England do not have computers based on 486s - I'd be surprised if it was more than 10%. I would suggest that low end P4s are in the majority

He never said they did. He just said that this would be an explanation of the performance claimed.

Any PC with a serial port can read a paper tape with a suitable paper tape reader attached (I've done this in the recent past)

I think he was joking, and using this to explain why a modern PC would be slower than a 60 year old valve based machine.

Better than a kid whinging on about things that he doesn't understand.

He wasn't. You were. It was a joke post to explain something that is apparently not the case. Don't take it so seriously.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly he was using American units. Remember, US 2 = ~3 standard units. NASA has problems with this all the time, I hear.

Re:Not really

[LWATCDR]

I would blame it on PBS. We only get Are You Being Served and Benny Hill. To us England looks forever stuck in the 70s :) Just kidding. Although I have to admit that I felt Benny Hill set back UK-USA relations a few decades as well.
Now Thin Blue Line, Black Adder(all of them) and Red Dawrf are cool :)

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

...I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)

(The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of pain (Palin) enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles (Jones) has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang (Gilliam) is just Cardinal Fang)

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is suprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again. (Exit and exeunt)

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I really doubt most Brits have 486 computers...I only have three.

Anyway...just imagine a beowulwhqfg Hey! Gimme back that keyboard!

A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[pslam]

Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC

Er, this is an obviously ridiculous statement. A modern PC is such an order of magnitude faster that it could probably run equations simulating the circuit behaviour itself and still run real time. Compare 1,000 values at 1MHz (which it probably isn't anywhere near in reality), and a slow tape data input (even with 5 of them), to 10 million transistors at 3GHz.

Funny thing is so many people seem to think there's nothing odd about it.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[DarkOx]

Yes but you have to remember that it was built to do one specific thing. When you design something for a single use, you get to make all sorts of assumptions which will allow you to optimize very very much. My DVD recorder is probably hundreds of times slower then my Athlong 64 system yet no matter what software I use it records video smoother with fewer frame drops. On the PC something happens like it becomes neccecary to flush the disk buffer and it will drop a frame, its hardly perceptable but sometimes you can detect it. PCs are so universal that you get to make few if any assumptions and that means more processing time. I imagine if you tried to write software for this thing to say transcode mp3 files to odd or something riddiculus like that your PC would finish months before this machine does.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[FraggedSquid]

Quite a few years ago there was an interview with one of the guys who worked on the Colossus. He stated that he had produced a machine code implementation of the task and ran it on the best PC he could find (may have been a PI or PII), expecting the PC code to run faster. He was surprised to find that Colossus was still much faster.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[MancDiceman]

Don't talk utter rubbish. You should be modded down for being a crank.

This is custom hardware designed for the job. MHz and GHz don't come into it. If you don't believe me, consider why the processor on so many graphics cards is slower than the CPU in the machine, yet without it, the graphics would grind to a halt. A modern PC is a general tool - Colossus wasn't, and was specifically designed and built to break crypto as quickly as possible. Now, if you were to try and run Pong on it, fair enough, you'd find it incredibly slow... but that's not what it's there for. Colossus would however easily crack Enigma codes quicker than your over-clocked P4. And it probably doesn't have as many neon lights in it.

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

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[garethwi]

Yes, but the Colossus doesn't run XP

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Shimbo]

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

Minor nit: Lorentz != Enigma.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Viceice]

Add to that, the writers "modern PC" is a modern in 1996. Which was what? a 486?

So while he may have been correct at the time the various parts of the project was underway, it's not true now.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Shmooze]

Pentiums were just on the market then! Cos early the next year I got given my first PC - A 166MHz Pentium. But even with the 1.3GHz Athlon i have now i suspect the colossus could decrypt faster... what with WinXP and all [on my machine, obviously].

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[pslam]

Add to that, the writers "modern PC" is a modern in 1996. Which was what? a 486? So while he may have been correct at the time the various parts of the project was underway, it's not true now.

No, I think the writers still didn't quite understand quite how far off they were even if we're talking about 1996. It's not like we're talking about massive DSP operations here - it's just handling text, albeit lots of characters at once. This makes the comparisons some people are making to the difference between CPU and GPU nonsense, because it's not exactly a hard job for a general purpose machine like rendering inherently is.

I'm sure a 486dx25 would be far faster if properly coded. Maybe he used GWBASIC.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Anonymous Coward]

from a Britsh Telecom website (www.connectedearth.com):

"Colossus was then built to find the Lorenz wheel settings used for each message, using a large electronic programmable logic calculator, driven by up to 2,500 thermionic valves. The computer was fast, even by today's standards. It could break the combination in about two hours - the same as a modern Pentium PC. " ...Meaning it was as fast as a reasonable pentium at running the algorithm to crack lorenz code wheel settings, which is a perfectly reasonable statement.
Do not take this to mean it's Quake III frame rates were any good.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Anonymous Coward]

From a British Telecom website (www.connectedearth.com):

"Colossus was then built to find the Lorenz wheel settings used for each message, using a large electronic programmable logic calculator, driven by up to 2,500 thermionic valves. The computer was fast, even by today's standards. It could break the combination in about two hours - the same as a modern Pentium PC." ... Meaning it was as good as a reasonable pentium at running the algorithm to crack lorenz wheel settings. It apparently processed these at 5000 characters per second, so the comparison seems fairly apt.

Please note this doesn't necessarily mean that it's Quake III frame rates were any good.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[SilkBD]

What a bunch of nonsense I'm reading here. Any piece of hardware can be emulated in software. A Modern day PC can very easily emulate the hardware of the Colossus.

Colussus uses logic circuitry, there's nothing enigmatic about it... a modern pc can implement it with great speed.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Tore S B]

Pentiums were just on the market then!

Give me a break - I have a Pentium 60 from 1992. It was hotter than an Athlon and burned insane amounts of power, but it was fast (and rediculously expensive) for its day. 1996 had seen at least a Pentium-Pro MMX, which essentially is a Pentium-II.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Tore S B]

I'm sure a 486dx25 would be far faster if properly coded. Maybe he used GWBASIC.

Ehum, WRONG - he is one of the best programmers in the world, and he implemented it in machine code (The problem itself, not an emulation of the machine) on a late Pentium, early PII-machine. And when that kind of programmer writes it in machine code, he OPTIMIZES it. He helped create the Y2K bug. :)

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[Shimbo]

No, I think the writers still didn't quite understand quite how far off they were even if we're talking about 1996.

That is what the guy who built the thing said. I think you underestimate how massively parallel the original machine was.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[nordicfrost]

As a child, I saw the Cray supercomputer at NTH in Trondheim. I was twice fascinated. First by the awesome raw computational power behind the very, very, very futuristic design. Second by the fact that it listed directory filse slower than my 8088 PC at home...

It did one thing (Certain mathematical computations), and it did it extremely well.

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[pslam]

That is what the guy who built the thing said. I think you underestimate how massively parallel the original machine was.

A few thousand gates total is massive parallism? You should see what you can implement in FPGAs which have that capacity - not a lot!

Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics!

[RedWizzard]

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

Tony Sale (the man who led the rebuild effort) wrote a simulation of the Colossus machine in Javascript. It is available here. A description of the simulation is available here (PDF).

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.

Funny thing about Slashdot - people seem to think their opinion is fact without bothering to do any research.

Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

A beowulf cluster of these things!

(sorry. No. Really. Sorry!)

Re:Imagine...

[SEWilco]

Back then, you have to imagine an Odysseus cluster of these things.

Re:Imagine...

[Short Circuit]

Well, they did run ten of these things simultaneously, each one working on a different chunk of the problem.

What about...

[etnoy]

Can I run Linux on it?

Re:Wikipedia Article

[noidentity]

There is also a wikipedia article about the Colossus computer , perhaps more relevant.

Civ

[Doomrat]

This gave me flashbacks of playing Civ II.

Ugh, and now I have to go play it instead of going to work. Trying to get fired is fun.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[ddkilzer]

The article mentions ENIAC, but not the Atanasoff-Berry Computer which pre-dated it, and which ENIAC was largely based upon.

For more information, read "Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer".

Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[psyberjedi]

It is greatly disputed whether or not the atanasoff was actually the basis for ENIAC.

The atanasoff must be widely accepted as the predecessor before complaining that it is being slighted.

Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[twd20]

or indeed Konrad Zuse who finished building his third computer in 1941 complete with reusable floating point arithmetic unit (way *way* ahead of ENIAC)

Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[ddkilzer]

[off-topic]

I suppose it depends on whether you accept a ruling by the United States District Court, District of Minnesota, Fourth Division or not. The trial, "declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer...." If I remember correctly, the judge stopped just short of accusing Mauchly of blatantly copying Atanasoff's ideas in his final decision.

The book I referred to in my original post does a very thorough job of explaining the details. You could only gather more by reading the court decision itself, along with all of the evidence presented during the trial.

Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[pmc]

Here we go again. There are four contenders in this race "First {suitably qualified} Computer":

The Zuse Zn (Z1 - 1938, Z2 - 1939, Z3 - 1941)
Colossus (1944)
ABC (between 1938 and 1942)
Eniac (1946)

The ABC was not Turing complete (and, indeed, not programmable), and was probably beaten into production by the Z3 anyway . The other three are Turing complete. The Z3 was the first to be Turing complete, but it was only realised in 1998 that this was true. Colossus was Turing complete (and this was known at the time - Turing worked next door after all), but was classified top secret. Eniac was Turing complete too, but was definitely last.

So, depending on your definition of computer and how "electronic" you insist on it being, you can pick any of them. But in my opinion the ABC has probably the narrowest of claims, with Colossus the best claim. Eniac definitely had the greatest influence.

The "electronic" part of this argument is in my opinion a complete red herring. Imagine in a few (?) years time when (if) nano-technology comes of age and instead of electronic switches we go back to nano-mechanical switches. Are these computers somehow inferior to the ABC just because they are once more electromechanical like the Zuse Z3 (albeit with switches a billion times smaller)? No, I don't think so.

This is not to criticise the ABC though - it was an impressive acheivement in its own right. But too much is claimed for it: for example it was not the first to use binary as is claimed - the Z1 used binary.

Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[PeterCook]

Excellent response to the ABC claim! Its basically about bragging rights. I worked as an educator in 1996 at the U. of Penn ENIAC museum and they insisted that I say that ENIAC was first to the public. I have visited the Colossus machine and spoken with Tony Sale about this - they insist Colossus was first. Let us not forget that Iowa State is also basing their claim on the fact that George Bush (Senior) presented a medal at the university declaring their's was first. Geek's love to claim their's was first, bigger, better, faster, etc.

Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again

[Anonymous Coward]

But in my opinion the ABC has probably the narrowest of claims, with Colossus the best claim.

How do you figure that? I'm British, and even I'll admit that Conrad Zuse beat us all with his Z3. Just because it wasn't generally recognised until 1998, it doesn't make the facts any less valid. Konrad Zuse built the first turing complete electronic programmable computer. Collosus was second. ENIAC third. As you say, the ABC doesn't even enter into the equation. It is about as much a turing complete electronic programmable computer as a telephone exchange of a similiar era.

Support Bletchley Park

[fantomas]

The work has been done at Bletchley Park by volunteers. Normally the Colossus machine is being rebuilt there and you can watch the guys working on it and ask them questions. I was at Bletchley Park (home of Station X, the UK codebreaking centre in World War 2) yesterday, brilliant, well worth a visit. It's run as a trust, by volunteers. They need your support. Bletchley Park receives no public funding. To date, the Trust has raised over 1 million in its fight for survival. A further 4.5 million is needed now to fund essential staffing, building refurbishment, infrastructure, planning and marketing costs. They are just about to lose 20 acres of the site to a private developer building a housing estate, and half the original Huts are falling down. The hut Alan Turing worked in has some of its windows covered with chipboard because the windows are broken and they don't seem to have the money to replace them. The paint is peeling and the wood is rotting, the wall round it has fallen over in parts.

The code breakers in these small prefabricated huts probably shortened the war by two years and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Surely us geeks can help save this site and remember their contribution? If you can't get there to volunteer, maybe use their online form and give them a small donation? Their website is going to be slashdotted at this rate, so how about slashdotting their intray with donations?

Re:Support Bletchley Park

[moviepig.com]

FWIW, the film ENIGMA is a romanticized but entertaining thriller about another important, earlier (than Colossus), Bletchley Park decryption mechanism.

Re:Support Bletchley Park

[jdtanner]

I only live 100 yards away...pop in for a cup of tea :-)

Re:Support Bletchley Park

[Anonymous Coward]

The code breakers in these small prefabricated huts probably shortened the war by two years
It's possible that they changed the result of the war.
The U-boat campaign, brilliantly directed by Admiral Doenitz, came close to knocking Britain out of the war, which would have ended the war in Europe. At the height of the U-boats' success, the food ration for a British citizen for a week could be held in one hand (that applied to someone in a non-essential job - manual workers got much more). Breaking the naval codes in May 1941 ensured that the U-boats would be defeated.

Re:Support Bletchley Park

[pjacobi]

Often forgotten (outside Poland):

The work on breaking Enigma started at the Polish Cipher Bureau with three Polish mathematicans Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki developing a mathematical model of its operation.

At Bletchley Park, there is plaque commemorating this contribution.

And the knowledge used was obtained by French intelligence, but only the Poles thought it possible to gain something out of it.

Googling for Poland Enigma will give you a lot of sources.

Or start here:
http://www.paiz.gov.pl/oldpai/newsletter/an gielski /NR20.htm#Conquerors%20of%20Enigma
http://www.awm .gov.au/news/codes.htm
http://wings.buffalo.edu/i nfo-poland/web/history/W WII/enigma/U-571.shtml

Re:Support Bletchley Park

[16K Ram Pack]

I can't believe this. When I look at the utter wank that got lottery grants like the pop music thing in Sheffield or the space centre in Leicester (because Leicester's famous for that).

I'm really skint at the moment, but if times are good, I'll send them something.

Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[salmacis2]

Colossus, and indeed the rest of the Bletchley Park operation was a tremendous example of war-time ingenuity.

I would urge all UK-based \.ers to go and visit Bletchley Park as soon as possible. It's an amazing day out. It's just sad that the UK government doesn't appear to recognise the historical significance of BP and spend whatever is required to restore the site. Hut 6 and Hut 1, where most of the decoding was done are practically falling down these days.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[pklong]

Oh great, a load of Slashdotters turning up. I can just imagine the poor guides when they ask the obligatory "Does anyone have any questions?".

Also they had better rope off the area properly or for some reason the machine will print out "Visit my 1337 site goatse" or "First Post" constantly.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[Kubla Khan]

Those guides will make minced meat of the average slashdotter. I've been and they know their stuff.
(And they'll let you bang away on a real enigma)

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[tehcyder]

Imagine slashdotting a physical site for once - how cool would that be?

Yes, it's a joke.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[DjReagan]

Been and done. Flashmobs went out of style last summer.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[mikerich]

I would urge all UK-based \.ers to go and visit Bletchley Park as soon as possible. It's an amazing day out. It's just sad that the UK government doesn't appear to recognise the historical significance of BP and spend whatever is required to restore the site. Hut 6 and Hut 1, where most of the decoding was done are practically falling down these days.

One of the few industrial donors to Bletchley Park has been - ummm - Siemens - who made Lorenz.

So German industry understands the importance of Bletchley Park - but seemingly not their British counterparts.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[Anonymous Coward]

First Decipher! I did it for 2600.com!

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[Slashamatic]

No, Siemens didn't make the Lorenz machine. There was a company caled Lorenz which later became merges with another company becoming Standard Elektrik Lorenz (SEL) after the war. SEL was part of ITT for a while but later got merged with the French Group, Alcatel.

Siemens did make teleprinters though, esp. during wartime and the Lorenz device wasn't standalone but rather acted as a 'postprocessor'.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[Cmdr TECO]

I would guess that this was the part of Siemens that was once Ferranti, maker of the first commercially available computer.

The real real wikipedia article (no troll)

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the real one!. Ignore the other ones, this is the REAL wikipedia link. Verify it for yourself!

We can rebuild him....

[millahtime]

Make him faster, stronger.....

glowbull warmongering funds to be redirected?

[Anonymous Coward]

reverberations to be felt by supporters of mag-lev, hydro, other alternative transportation, & the growing # of hungry/sick babies, & their parents, neighbors, infinitum?

Re:glowbull warmongering funds to be redirected?

[SEWilco]

I think that is the Mother of All Trolls, but Babelfish couldn't quite handle it properly.

Wikipedia on karma whoring

[CrystalFalcon]

There is a Wikipedia article on karma whoring here.

Re:Wikipedia on karma whoring

[Squirrley]

I don't think that karma whoring is actually mentioned in the article.

Re:Wikipedia on karma whoring

[tehcyder]

Yes, and you don't gain karma for being funny.

Re:Wikipedia on karma whoring

[Anonymous Coward]

At least wikipedia has a article on goatse.x, along with a history and a list of mirror sites. There's nothing more impressive than a solid and concise piece of research.

Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[nounderscores]

Britain invents, loses interest, somebody else commercialises, and then Britain still wins the war.

How do those Brits do it?

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[TGK]

Easy. Unless the invention is some major breakthrough in naval warfare the Brits don't loose interest.

Since you need either boats or a well trained swim team to invade the UK they're good to go for the most part as long as they maintain naval superiority.

That's why the battle for the Atlantic was so important.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[kraut]

Actually, it was mainly the Americans wot won the wars, combined, of course, with magnificent stupidity in the German leadership in both cases.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[pjt33]

Having a massive Empire providing income and troops didn't hurt.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Moraelin]

Really? I thought it was the millions of Russians who died. The Americans got anywhere _near_ the war after the Russians were already stopping the Germans.

And those strategic bombings never did much damage either. In fact, it cost the US far more to bomb Germany, than it cost Germany to rebuild the odd factory that got hit by a bomb and replace/repair the fighters.

Now I'm not saying that US didn't help, and we're all grateful for that. (If nothing else, otherwise the whole Europe would have ended up communist.)

But, no offense, claiming to basically have singlehandedly won the war is a tad shameless. Without the USSR to hammer the Germans from the other side, and without the UK as a base, the US wouldn't even have made it onto the European mainland. Much less beatten Germany.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

But at current APR, the interest is building up nicely.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. American losses in WW2 were approx 400,000. Russian losses were computed on the basis of depopulated square miles of Russia.

Certainly we in Europe are grateful to America for its help, but despite what Hollywood may suggest, America didn't single handedly win the war.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

(If nothing else, otherwise the whole Europe would have ended up communist.)

Or Nazi. Either way we would have ended up with a continent of people with one muscular arm.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[corbettw]

Either way we would have ended up with a continent of people with one muscular arm.

Wait, I'm confused. You'd end up with a continent of Slashdot readers?

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Lurker McLurker]

Alternatively, you could use Aeroplanes, and paratroopers.

That's why the Battle of Britain was so important. The battle for the Atlantic was more about keeping Britain from getting supplies from Canada and the U.S.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Schaffner]

To paraphase Gen. Patton, you don't win wars by dying for your country, you win wars by making some other SOB die for his country. The Brits still haven't been able to figure this out even after such WWI battles as the Somme and Gallipoli. The idea is to make the other guy have a larger casualty count, not kill off your own forces.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Matt_UK]

Alternatively, you could use Aeroplanes, and paratroopers.

Err no you can't the air lift capability of the 1940 could manage a jeep size weight but not much more.

The Battel of Briten was about getting bombers through to distroy the RAF on the Ground and also the manufacturing base. The Gemans only had adapted river barges to use, The RN could have reaked havoc on them.
So the battle of Britain was important to win to stop the distruction of london and the manufacturing but not to stop an invation. The Germans never realy develped workable plans fo this (Sealion was not really practicable)

A couple of good books, both by the same author (Len Deighton) Fighter (non-fiction) and SS-GB (fiction - what if the invation had happend)

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, Communist. Stalin was beating Hitler to a bloody pulp on the Eastern front. Given enough time the USSR would not have rolled straight into Berlin, they would have rolled over it and right across Europe, upto the western coast. The entire European mainland would have been part of the USSR.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

We should never forget the thousands of troops who fought for the King. Canada, Australia, the West Indies, India, a bunch of African nations..they all did their bit.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[localman]

Actually, you win wars by overwhelming the enemy. It doesn't matter if more of your own troops die if you have plenty more to start with. The Russians may have had a poor kill-to-die ratio, but they still slammed the Germans with sheer numbers.

Cheers.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[mschiller]

I think you missed a fundamental point. The United States didn't contribute massively to the head count of soldiers etc [ at least not early on!]. The United States contribution was in a fully functional industrial and research base. Well before the United States officially entered the war we were supplying massive quantities of War equipment and technology secretly to the Allied war effort [England and France]. We couldn't do much more due to the political situation at home, but what we did was quite substantial! After Japan made the massive mistake of attacking Pearl Harbor [I hasten to add that early radar SHOULD have prevented that, so there is evidence to suggest the Military/Government LET it happen to manipulate the political situation], the political situation changed and we were able to help in a more definitive way.

While the USSR was a massive help in containing Nazi Germany, I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the allies would have LOST without their support. If they had stayed neutral and only protected their own borders, the allies may still have won due to the development of nuclear weapons and Radar. Admitedly Germany wasn't far behind, so the outcome would not of been certain. What is for certain without the attack from two fronts, the war would have been messier for the U.S. and Europe alike.

But remember folks the fundamental help America gave to the War effort in Europe wasn't men, but equipment and technology from our fully functional technological base. [When America joined the war in Earnest December 7th, 1943, England and France were already in shambles!].

After the war, there is no denying the US contribution to rebuilding Western Europe. Of course Eastern Europe recieved no such help, but that's another story.... And the greedy bastards we are, took full advantage of the situation as we became the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world [As the only truly industrialized nation in the world after WWII, we had a certain number of years before Western Europe rebuilt their industrial base, while Russia lagged behind due to their economic policies].

Of course the real success story was Japan, who used the situation to MODERNIZE their factories......

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[naily]

Hear hear!

I'm waiting for 'Colossus' the movie, starring a daring team of americans at Bletchley who single-handedly invent Colossus, run Ultra and crack the codes just in time, all the while undermined by those stuck-up brits who always try to spoil everything by saying "You bloody yanks can't just storm in here and expect to win the war in a week!".

An old ex-empire Britain may be, but they were the first empire to dismantle itself (for the most part), and every territory they lost was made, by and large, in their image. The english civil war was over 50 years before the french revolution - they created the first democracy in europe (by killing their king - can you imagine usurping your own president?), and the american ideals of democracy were descended from this. Oh, and industry? The brits invented that too - Adam Smith was no yank!

My point is that every empire has its day, even with the best will in the world. And when your time comes you can either acceed to the rising benevolent power (US, not Nazi), or have power wrestled from you.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Psymunn]

The russians did an excellent job fighting the germans but one of teh most important contributions of the US was, after teh war, stopping the russians. Towards the end of the war it was becoming considerably more clear that Russia had less then altruistic motives for 'liberating' eastern europe from the nazi opressors.
That is not to say, the Americans didn't play a hugely important role towards the end of the war. Their constent air raids along side the british helped gain teh upper hand in europe and, no one can doubt the impact the bombing of hiroshima had on the war.
Still, the Americans did not single handedly win the war, though, having not endured the burden of combat as long as the rest of the Allies (and only once having been directly attacked), they emerged looking less fatigued and scarred then the rest of their allies

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another example of European inferiority complex.

That's ok. Next time you get your asses kicked, you'll come running to America.

Yet again.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[TomV]

I'm waiting for 'Colossus' the movie, starring a daring team of americans at Bletchley who single-handedly invent Colossus, run Ultra and crack the codes just in time

One vital detail missing there, the bit where handsome Texan stud Alan Turing gets the girl at the end ;-)

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Dutchmaan]

Towards the end of the war it was becoming considerably more clear that Russia had less then altruistic motives for 'liberating' eastern europe from the nazi opressors.

War rarely has altruistic elements in the big picture.. and is NEVER 100% altruistic. If you're fighting beyond your own shores then you have something to gain from it, whether it's financial or strategic.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[DunbarTheInept]

Britain had (and still has) a population that's "too large" for the land area of the british isles - meaning that they must depend on imports to keep industry going and to keep people fed. In peacetime this works just fine, as they do have a good amount of money and can afford this sort of practice. But if they can't ship anything on the oceans, then they can't support their population or industry. That's what made the battle of the atlantic so important. Keeping Britain supplied was more difficult than keeping the Germans from invading. Keeping the Germans from invading was not that hard because they didn't have enough ships to do it. Despite the fact that the German army was better than the British home defenses in both armorments and in numbers, they would only be able to attack with a few of them at a time due to the bottleneck in ship transport, and that's an assured disaster for the attacker. So while the Battle of Britain was nice in that it kept the Germans from trying to invade, and gave the Luftwaffe a good punch in the nose, even if it had been lost the subsequent German invasion still would have either had to occur immediately, in which case it would have failed for lack of ships, or it would have to take a few years to prepare, in which case Britain wouldn't have been alone anymore by then.

But, if you can cut the sea traffic, Britain's citizens starve, and nobody can put up a resistance under those conditions.

At first the German u-boats were nearly invincible. The only thing that kept the British sea traffic going was that there was just so *MUCH* of it that you could sink a superfrieghter every 5 days and still leave enough trade to keep Britain going.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

And those strategic bombings never did much damage either. In fact, it cost the US far more to bomb Germany, than it cost Germany to rebuild the odd factory that got hit by a bomb and replace/repair the fighters.

BULL SHIT.. That is just something you made up.. The Germans had a great deal of trouble esp towards the end of the war as bombers got more accurate. As combat losses added up, it sure as hell was not so easy to just move a factory!!

As for the rest, you go to far in making your point. If the Germans didn't have a second front or in fact two to worry about, they would likely have had enough resources to finaly really beat Russia. It was truly a group effort.. The US/Allies made the final victory possible, the English and the Russians held on until a critical mass built up for D-Day.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[DunbarTheInept]

It's not entirely true that the bombing didn't have much damage. The reason the German industry grew immune to it was that the Germans would rebuild factories further to the east, to escape the range of the bombers. But that had the direct effect of putting the factories closer to the Russian Front - which wasn't exactly a safe haven either. Because of Russian advances on the ground, the germans did lose industry very quickly in the end and thus lose their ability to supply their armies and thus they collapsed rather fast once they were back within their own borders. But it was allied bombing that forced them to put the factories where the Russians could overtake them, instead of keeping them safely in the core of Germany. So, yes, the allied bombing had a very big effect on the war - it forced the Germans to disperse their industry to the periphery, and thus it sped up the ending phase where the Germans were in retreat.

It's still a lie to say the US is solely responsible, of course. I agree with you on that sentiment. (Although it's important not to downplay the Pacific theatre, in which the US was in a position to do most of the effort, and did so despite putting less resources into it than into the European theatre - good cryptography played a major role there - the US knew the Japaneese codes and therefore could predict exactly when and where to concentrate forces to handle Japanese attacks, and thus could beat the japaneese even with the drastically reduced forces left after Pearl Harbor.)

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Ben Hutchings]

The film's already been done: Enigma. Turing remained British but got a girlfriend.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[dcam]

The Germans also moved them underground. At the end of the war there were many factories dicovered in disused underground railways, quarries and mines. I can't find a link to it, but in the memiours of a Frenchman flying for the RAF (The Big Show by Pierre Closterman) this is covered in some detail. He also mentions the speed at which the Germans were able to start producing equipment after a bombing raid.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[TGK]

Hate to reply to the reply to my post. Hate to do it even more when it's really directed at the two people replying to the parent of my reply (wow... that's confusing).

The Battle of Britain was important on several levels. None of those levels involved an aerial invasion of the UK by the Nazis. The heavy lifting capacity just didn't exist at the time.

The Battle of the Atlantic, not the Battle of Britain, was about keeping the Brits supplied. The Battle of Britain was fought over the Channel, and no one in his right mind would take a ship through that contested strip of water without good reason.

No the Battle of Britain was about air superiority. You see, the destroyer and battleship didn't fair that well against air power. The bulk of the British fleet at this time was made up of these heavy gunships.

Both the Germans and the Brits knew that whoever held air superiority over the Channel had the ability to field battleships and other heavy gun ships into that channel. Anyone who could do that could bombard the hell out of coastal defenses and eventually win through against them.

In short, air superiority was necessary to begin an invasion across the channel, in either direction.

The Battle of Britain was aptly named; whoever lost air superiority over the channel would ultimately loose their land overlooking the channel. For the allies, the prize was Great Britain.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[The AtomicPunk]

[When America joined the war in Earnest December 7th, 1943, England and France were already in shambled!].

1943? Was that when Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? :)

Where's Earnest, North Africa? :)

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Thundersnatch]

Umm... first of all, the U.S. entered the war in force by mid-1942, when Russia was on the ropes at Stalingrad. The Battle of Britain was won, but invasion of the UK was certainly still possible if teh Soviets capitulated. American bombing of continental transport and oil fields greatly exacerbated the German logistical problems that prevented them from victory at Moscow and Stalingrad. Perhaps the tide would not have turned at Stalingrad if the Germans had been able to get another few armored divisions to von Paulus, pushing the Soviets completely across the Volga...

Also, you are totally forgetting about the war in the Pacific against Japan. The U.S. fought (mostly) alone a heavily industrialized and militarized nation of 100+ million people for the duration of the war.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Mikoca]

They (the US) also gave machinery and technology to the Russians, just to add to the picture.

Although I think "what if"-s are the stupidest kind of considerations. Think about an analogous statement in a computer program.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[mschiller]

Sue me... My memory sucks and I got the year wrong... Let's try Japan bombing pearl harbor December 7th, 1941 -- Matthew

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget that the Americans will succeed in getting vital German Navy Enigma settings for the British...

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[naily]

Uh, actually, no. That was the Brits in real life, and in fact the inspiration for my little bout of movie humour. British sense of humour, y'see. What the rest of the world like to (often mis-)label 'irony'. As a faithful /.er I prefer the word 'droll'. Keep watching the Monty Python... ;o)

UK track record

[pommiekiwifruit]

OK, so we tossed away the computer, aerospace, and other industries.

But look at the popularity of the ideas we exported; why, in central London a pub has a sign outside saying it was where the Communist Manifesto was launched, and offering themed lunches (borscht etc.) (oddly I can't remember a similar sign outside the hofbrauhaus in Munich). Who would have thought that would take off?

Re:UK track record

[Anonymous Coward]

But look at the popularity of the ideas we exported;...

Yeah...Herman's Hermits and Davey Jones. I'll admit there was some good...like the Beatles, the Stones, Monty Python, even Benny Hill was cool.

Really the First 'Computer'?

[Geiger581]

The Colossi were not programmable (they just did precisely one thing rather well), so it may be hard to consider them computers in all possible senses. Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Wikipedia Link) was also completed two years prior and was Turing complete, so it's hard to really give Colossus any credit other than the impact it had on the war.

Re:Really the First 'Computer'?

[AC-x]

Colossus wasn't the first computer, but I think it was the first all electronic computer, whereas the Z3 used physical relay switches.

If you're after the first programmable computer then Charles Babbage's Difference Engine beat the Z3 by over 100 years (although he never actually finished building it the science museum reproduced it and it worked)

Re:Really the First 'Computer'?

[pmc]

Two things - the Colossi were definitely programmable. I haven't got the reference handy, but there is an account of it in "Codebreakers: the Inside Story of Bletchly Park", where in the period between the end of the war and the decommisioning of BP some of the staff had fun programming the Colossi to do other computation tasks (such as print out the ten times table IIRC).

Secondly, nobody realised (or, rather, proved) that the Z3 were Turing complete until 1998. Zuse had suspected it, but wasn't sure.

Re:Really the First 'Computer'?

[Cmdr TECO]

Do you have a source for the claim that the Z3 was Turing-complete? I think this statement is due to a misinterpretation of Raúl Rojas' work; he showed that the Z3 was equivalent to a Turing machine with finite tape, which is computationally equivalent to a finite state machine, not a universal Turing machine.

intersting book on colossus...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my grad school professors wrote a detailed book on colossus as a project to keep him busy in retirement.

"From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park"

by Harvey Cragon

On amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/09 74 304506/qid=1086095280/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-610257 7-9835954?v=glance&s=books

I proofread an early copy of the book and it was quite interesting how the cryptanalysis was done and even more impressive what these people accomplished with technology that was, to quote Spock, not much removed from bearskins and stone knives.

maybe...

[lachlan76]

I have seen a project to run programs on a gpu, with BrookGPU.
It would only be applicable for certain applications, but some of the things that a graphics card excels at (I think) are linear algebra, vector manipulation, and some other number-crunching activities.
You can't run linux on it though, just programs written in Brook Stream language (an extension of ANSI C).

but don't mention U-571 :-)

[fantomas]

...but if you get to Bletchley Park, for goodness sake don't mention the film U-571 :-) the retired UK military people who are the tour guides get a bit twitchy that Hollywood makes out it was the US Navy and not the Royal Navy (UK) who grabbed vital code books from a sinking U-boat (which I think was actually U-110). (actually they are quite relaxed and happy to correct/ give more info , plus the U571 film makers donated a couple of huge u-boat props which are in the grounds of BP).

Re:but don't mention U-571 :-)

[gowen]

It was U110, captured by the crew of HMS Bulldog, complete with an Enigma machine and up-to-date codebooks (May 9, 1941). U559 and U506 were later captured with Enigma machines, the former by crew of HMS Petard (30 October, 1942), the latter by US Navy Task Force 22.3 (June 4, 1944)

Re:but don't mention U-571 :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets not forget it was the Polish who captured the first three-wheel Enigma machines and codebooks and whom worked on deciphering them prior to us getting into it.

Re:but don't mention U-571 :-)

[gowen]

Indeed, a vital piece of the puzzle. But they got theirs pre-war, from some mislabelled luggage, which doesn't make as good a movie as a raid on a scuppered submarine.

The ARM bombshell

[Anonymous Coward]

" you might want to think about that next time you do anything on a computer whos CPU is based on an ARM core."

I'll be sure to keep that in mind.

Not that its likely to happen. But I will keep that in mind.

Re:The ARM bombshell

[Panaflex]

Ever used a Zaurus or a iPaq( That's why it's called StrongARM )? How about a newer Palm Pilot?

The ARM processor is a wonder of low power design!

Perhaps I will crawl back into the cave and stare at the shadows...

Pan

I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

...welcome our new code-breaking overlord...

no really, please don't arm those nukes...

What about Babbage...

[jdtanner]

...who made the first computer and printer!!!

yes modern PC. I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC.

Hmm .. that translations to 1.2 microseconds per instruction?

Yes, I'd even dare say that it's *faster* than a modern PC. ..

Running Windows that is.

Let the british have their moment in the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop it. They think they invented the computer, and its something for them to hold onto.

If you puncture that, they may try to invade Wales to compensate. Probably build a lot of pointless castles, put men in funny tin suits, and force us to watch a lot of unentertaining films about camelot.

Pathetic.

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[Shmooze]

Ah well, since no-one can accept british superiority, here is an abridged list of british inventions ripped of by the good ol' US of A.

1) Computers
2) 'RSA' encryption
3) Jet engines
4) All-Moving tailplanes (to allow supersonic jets)
5) Jump-jets (namely, Harrier)
6) Radar and Microwave ovens
+ Many more but i'm feeling far too lazy.

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[starless]

Also the electric light bulb (Swan and not Edison).
http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/d ocs/edison .asp

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[garyok]

I would have added

7. Inalienable human rights (Magna Carta)
8. Liberal democracy (John Stuart Mill, John Locke, etc., etc...)

but the Americans don't seem to be using them any more. Can you send them back to Britain please if you're finished with them please?

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[uohcicds]

...and wasn't Tom Paine actually British as well.

Of course, the medium you are using now was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland. The underlying technology (that became ARPANet) was actually suggested by researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in England, built on Baran's (an American!) packet switching idea.

And any time you use PKI, remember that it was someone from Britain (GCHQ) who actually invented it, althuogh the UK government made him sit on it (see www.gchq.gov.uk)

But then of course, most of the interesting work in Science and Mathematics was done either by the British or by others working here like Dirac, Wittgenstein, Rutherford, Davy, Hooke and Newton inter alia.

This is not meant to sound like a flag-waving exercise for the UK, just to remind some of our less intelligent colonial friends that they did not, in fact, invent everything and bless the world with their very existence. I mean, you can't even find WMD in a country the size of Iraq...

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[garyok]

One idea they never stole: steak and kidney pie. Yeeurrgh! They can have that for a bloody start.

What else is uniquely British that we'd want to entice the Americans into 'stealing' in a sort of 'You touched it last! It's your's now!' way?

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight; you're British but you don't like a nice ale-marinaded steak and kidney pie with chips and pies and a pint? Fuck me, whats the world coming to?

What else is uniquely British that we'd want to entice the Americans into 'stealing' in a sort of 'You touched it last! It's your's now!' way?

The Welsh?

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck me...

No thanks

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[garyok]

Let me get this straight; you're British but you don't like a nice ale-marinaded steak and kidney pie with chips and pies and a pint?

Kidneys sieve piss. That's the only reason I need.

Oh, and that crack about our leek-loving neighbours: we've already inflicted them on the Aussies and look at the damage that's done. No, we're safer with them where they are.

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[uohcicds]

Tripe and onions perhaps. Yum

You're not getting the order of magnitude

[pslam]

This is custom hardware designed for the job. MHz and GHz don't come into it. If you don't believe me, consider why the processor on so many graphics cards is slower than the CPU in the machine, yet without it, the graphics would grind to a halt.

(repeat subject line here) A modern PC is 2-3GHz, can compute 3 general purpose 32 bit operations per cycle, and has a gate count of about 50 million. Colossus is sub-1MHz, computes "100 bits per cycle" (hard to tell from article text) and has a gate count of 1,000. It also has a tape input which probably amounts to about 25KB/sec (so I am told).

No amount of specific purpose machinary is going to catch up with that order of magnitude difference. Please, I can easily imagine simulating the analog signals going through the 1,000 or so valves in real time on a modern PC, let alone emulating it digitally.

Re:You're not getting the order of magnitude

[operagost]

They say it handles two bits at a time. Doesn't that indicate that's it's a digital computer, not analog?

Re:You're not getting the order of magnitude

[pslam]

They say it handles two bits at a time. Doesn't that indicate that's it's a digital computer, not analog?

That's exactly my point - it's a digital computer but I say you could treat the circuits and analog and simulate the gate signals themselves, and still be real time. And if that's true, then the task it's performing must be computable in many orders of magnitude faster than real time on a modern PC.

Next people will be claiming that 1,000,000 people each using an abacus is faster than a modern PC because it's "specific purpose" and "parallel". Hell, you could probably model the physics of each bead as it moves and still do it real time on a PC...

Re:You're not getting the order of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

The comparison is probably to a similar algorithm programmed in a high level language on the PC, and assuming that the programmer wasn't optimizing for speed and used something like Python, the quoted figure isn't impossible.

Re:You're not getting the order of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

'Order of magnitude' means 'times ten'. You mean 'orders of magnitude', and quite a few of them. Just thought I'd point that out.

Re:You're not getting the order of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it means 'times the base'. If an ancient Sumerian, used to a sexagesimal numbering system, said that one thing was an order of magnitude larger than another, it was 60 times bigger.

Brit RSA encrytion

[BlightThePower]

For more information see "The Code Book" by Simon Singh.

It was developed by the superbly named Clifford Cocks, a at GCHQ in 1973 (IIRC thats three years before Rivest et al.) Apparently he thought it no big deal (completing an implementation of Ellis' original proof-of-concept practically overnight) and filed it away for further reference. End of story. Cocks is now chief mathematician at GCHQ; and given that he's probably intercepting this communication as I write, I dare say he will pop-up if what I've said is inaccurate!

The true tragedy is obviously that RSA is called RSA, rather than the far more amusing "Cocks Encryption" or similar. The sheer weight of punnage (e.g., "Hard Cocks Encryption" anyone?) is a tragic is a loss to humanity IMHO.

Re:Brit RSA encrytion

[meringuoid]

Cocks is now chief mathematician at GCHQ; and given that he's probably intercepting this communication as I write, I dare say he will pop-up if what I've said is inaccurate!

Well, yes, GCHQ have almost certainly logged this communication - as will Google in the not too distant future, so that's not so cloak-and-dagger... But I doubt the great man will actually turn up. More likely some large men will be coming around to explain to you why, if you're going to make fun of people's names, it's perhaps wise to pick people who aren't highly placed members of large international espionage organisations...

Re:Brit RSA encrytion

[BlightThePower]

You know, I have the funny feeling he has probably heard it all before...

Re:Brit RSA encrytion

[Ernesto Alvarez]

The interesting thing about britain's RSA was not the invention of the method itself. They knew it was theoretically possible to do public key encipherment early in the 1970s, but didn't know any functions that would be useful. They called this idea "Non-secret encryption".
Then based on that model they discovered methods that were similar to RSA (Cocks, 1973) and Diffie-Hellman (Williamson, 1974).
Apparently, even though they knew how to encrypt, they didn't realize that it could also be used as a digital signature scheme.

The list of papers are:

Basic theory:
The possibility of secure non-secret digital encryption, J.H. Ellis 1970

RSA:
A note on "Non-secret encryption", C. C. Cocks 1973

Diffie-Hellman:
Non-secret encryption using a finite field, M. J. Williamson 1974
Thoughts on cheaper non-secret encryption, M.J. Williamson 1976

Historical:
The history of non-secret encryption, J.H. Ellis 199?

Those documents are in the gchq site, or somewhere near, but it is a PITA to search there (if you do, check both "non-secret" and "non secret", but I'd recommend google instead.

Re:Brit RSA encrytion

[garyok]

... And the people that it said didn't even know they were under suspicion.

Re:Brit RSA encrytion

[BlightThePower]

Well, I would continue to be facetious about it, but I get the feeling the MI5 agent currently holding a revolver to my head wouldn't like it very much!

Thats not what the article says.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

It doesn't say that it was cleverly designed to do a single purpose so that its as fast as modern processors. It says that its parallel tape drives were so fast that it can match modern processors. That is a ridiculous statement. Now, that doesn't mean that it isn't as fast as modern computers, but that it isn't because of the speed of the hardware.

don't celebrate

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not celebrate the death you insensitive clod!

If You RTFA, You'd Get This

[Luigi30]

Fatal error on tape0 - unknown error, paper exploded?

"speed of a modern PC..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to make this statement a bit more qualified, according to the WayBackMachine, the Lorenz cipher link (where the claim of being equivalent to modern computers is made) was uploaded in 2000.

So the claim that it is as fast as a modern PC needs to be evaluated with respect to the computing hardware available at the time (1GHz-ish systems)

I will admit, however, that the system is very specialized, which has an impact on any comparison to other hardware.

Anyone still claiming that the Colossus is equivalent (as the BBC article implies) is misinformed.

MOD PARENT DOWN GOATSE LINK

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said

Shh!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't run into the middle of your snipe hunt, why are you running into mine?

Milking it..

[Keck]

" Three months were spent re-drawing the machine using CAD (Computer Aided Design) software on a computer with a 486 processor."

They could have saved 2 months by using a more recent machine.. ANYTHING...

Re:Milking it..

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have saved 2 months by using a more recent machine.. ANYTHING...

"The Colossus Rebuild Project started in 1993"

Re:Milking it..

[Junior J. Junior III]

The rebuild project was initiated in 1993, so a 486 they used at the time was a high-end workstation.

troll

[Anonymous Coward]

There is plenty of reasons for the day to be celebrated. Think of the people who had hope restored to them on D-Day.

Re:Are we "celebrating" D-Day now?

[magarity]

Hooray! Thousands of people died! Let's par-tay!

Perhaps you need a refresher on the meaning of 'celebrate' before making would-be sarcastic remarks:

"1 : to perform (a sacrament or solemn ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites"
"2 a : to honor (as a holiday) by solemn ceremonies"

Integrated CPU instructions

[phorm]

Which makes me wonder, if the dedicated instruction sets in your current GPU's were eventually to be included in a CPU, would this not be a major performance increase gaming-wise since it would eliminate the need for data to transfer through the PCI/AGP bus?

Of course, the CPU's would have to be "gamer CPUs" since for standard non-gaming applications this would only be a lot of bloat.

Isn't this somewhat akin to what 3dnow etc was supposed to be about?

Re:Integrated CPU instructions

[Short Circuit]

You'd still need to transfer data through the AGP bus. More data than currently is done, in fact.

Modern graphics cards assemble each frame from a collection of images, or textures, that are provided it. The GPU performs mathematical operations on these textures in order to orient them somewhere in the field of view.

If you performed all of the operations on the CPU, you'd not only be taking up instruction cycles, you'd have to transmit entire frames through the AGP bus. 1600x1200x24bytes works out to about 44Mb per frame. At 24 fps, that's about one gigabit per second. That's an awful low refresh rate. Let's raise it to 56Hz. Now we're at 2.33Gb/s, more than normal PCI. Let's go for a smooth 85Hz: Now we're at 3.54Gb/s. Let's look forwards to higher resolutions, say, 3200x2400@85Hz: 14.17Gb/s. More than the latest HyperTransport revision can handle. By this time, you've already crowded out hard drive and network access. Your sound might be in trouble too.

That's an awful lot of bandwidth. And don't forget the space on the CPU die, and cache pollution for other processes. And Memory latency, not to mention the fact that a lot of that memory could be used for other game data.

That's not to say there wouldn't be advantages. You could also conceivably perform physics calculations like collision detection and simple FEA.

All in all, though, it's more efficient to have a multiprocessor setup where specific tasks are run on specialized hardware.

Even more minor nit

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Lorentz!=Lorenz

Speed of a modern PC

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I think the story goes something like this: a few years ago the team reproducing the Colossus set out by writing an emulator for the PC. It wasn't written that smartly and ran slower than the real thing. Now, several years later, that statement is being repeated more often than it should be. But I think that in the weak sense I have outlined it was once true.

Related stuff

[jarek]

Some of the stuff in the links below will be found in the Code Book. It's interesting stuff anyway.

link1

link2

Happy reading.

/jarek

Cool - was at BP a year ago!

[PeterCook]

When I was there Tony Sale was hard at work - he has an impressive background computer restoration wise with the London Science Museum too. The museum it is in is really great and the tour is a lot of fun - when I was there two employees from IBM in the US were there too. If you visit Bletchley Park (NW of London - take the train from Euston station in London to Bletchley) all that remains of the building where the 10 Colossus computers is the stone front step. The building, computers and blueprints were destroyed at the end of the war. One Colossus computer was sent to GCHQ in Cheltenham at the end of the war then reportedly disassembled later. Enjoy.

Colossus of the X-Men

[beatleadam]

Colossus has been Rebuilt

Great! In time for the next X-Men movie too :-)

Visiting Bletchley Park - go on a weekend

[Animats]

As others have mentioned, it's worth a visit. But go on a weekend, when the volunteers show up. I went on a weekday, and the tour guide was more into English country architecture than cryptography.

The Forbin Project Sequel!

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

I recall reading the 2 sequels many years ago:

The Fall of Colossus (Forbin enlists aliens to take Colossus down)

Colossus and the Crab (they rebuild it)

If you happen to be in Berkeley, CA, go to the top of the hill above the campus and visit the Lawrence Hall of Science, where the exteriors for Colossus were shot. There's a great view of San Francisco Bay from there. (LHoS is pretty cool, too.)

Re:Are we "celebrating" D-Day now?

[wcrowe]

Yes, but look at the context of how it was used. Are you saying that the rebuilding of Collusus was a solemn ceremony or a sacrament?

How about using, "In memory of D-Day...", instead?

Early computer and precomputer devices

[Animats]

There were a number of devices in that era, Colossus included, that really weren't computers.

• Harvard Mark 1 (1939 - 1944) - semi-programmable electromechanical computing machine.
• Zuse Z3 (1938-1941) - small general purpose relay computer. Good architecture, but limited by relay speeds to a 5Hz (yes, Hz) clock. First floating point unit. No jump instruction, due to a low budget. The later Z4 (1945-1949) had jumps and conditional branches.
• Atanasoff-Berry (1937-1942) Programmable, electronic arithmetic, binary, but memory was a rotating drum of capacitors.
• Colossus (1944?) Special-purpose key-testing machine.
• ENIAC (1943-1946) - plugboard-programmed tube machine. No general purpose memory, just registers. Tube ALU.
• IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946) - first commercial electronic computing product. Punched card I/O, not truly programmable, but electronic multiplication and division.

Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.

Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC, (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.

With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.

The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.

Linux

[linuxpyro]

I wonder if you could get Linux running on it...

Obligatory /. posts

[SteamyMobile]

1. NetBSD has now been ported to the Colossus architecture.
2. Can it be over-clocked?
3. Yes, it could be over-clocked, but that would require more energy than can be gotten from fossil fuels, so it would need either solar power, a new battery technology, or, let's not kid ourselves, nuclear power.
4. SCO wants them to send $699.

5. ----------
   WAP porn

Re:Obligatory /. posts

[NuclearDog]

You forgot one:

1) Rebuild really old technology.
2) ???
3) Profit!

Re:Are we "celebrating" D-Day now?

[gamgee5273]

I think the millions in Europe that were liberated because D-Day worked would consider it a reason to celebrate.

Not to mention the hundreds of thousands that were still sitting in concentration and death camps at the time of the invasion.

Yes, I think "celebration" is appropriate.

Would that be the NASA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that be the NASA that succeeded at landing things on Mars? Is that the NASA that you mean?

Re:Would that be the NASA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which succeeded? Was that the mission after they sent a multi-million dollar probe hurtling into the ground in a ball of screaming flames at several thousand kilometers per hour due their inability to convert properly?

P.S: The ESA Mars Express is happily in orbit around Mars. Just as NASA has the occasional mishap in amongst the victories, so do the ESA.

Re:Would that be the NASA...

[arevos]

Hey, we succeeded in landing things on Mars too! Just not in all one piece :)

It's actually faster than a modern PC

[unassimilatible]

If you take in consideration the lack of spyware, and some bloated OS like Windows XP.

But seriously, this is a truly awesome article, IMO. Keep in mind people, we are talking 19-friggin'-44!

Re:It's actually faster than a modern PC

[kin_korn_karn]

amazing what a nation can accomplish when it has to fight for its survival

Re:good design - for a crappy 2-bit machine....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Colossus first worked at two-bit level"

The Germans won the war

[Slashamatic]

... for the allies.

Between stupidity shown by Hitler's personal direction of the German military command and the diversion of Germany's war effort to the obsession with racial purification, they substantially ruined themselves. They were also slower to mobilise their women into factories. Slaves are much less productive than patriotic employees, especially if your goal is to work them to death.

Remarkably???

[Quixadhal]

Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC.

Considering how modern PeeCee's are moving away from parallel data I/O ("Let's sell everyone on SERIAL-ATA, it's faster because it's errr... serial!"), this shouldn't be a surprise.

The only difficulty in operating parallel circuits is synchronization. If the problem is nicely divideable into independant segments (as most code-breaking efforts are), parallel will always be an improvement.

Ideally, the SATA people (only one letter away, you know!) should have designed a spec that fixed the number of drive heads and had one data line per head... thus giving us REAL parallel data I/O if the data is properly striped.

"Speed of a modern PC"?

[Phurd Phlegm]

I don't get that. A modern PC has gate times in the way sub-nanaosecond range, so how does a super-microsecond time equate to "speed of a modern PC" even if there are five channels going at once? I actually read the referenced article and it didn't say anything like that. Maybe I should have searched for supplementary info.

Or maybe this was first posted in 1985. That would make this the oldest Slashdot dupe yet discovered....

Apparently it runs a Microsoft OS and has a virus

[whoever57]

... surely the only explanation for all the virus infected emails my wife keeps receiving from a machine that announces itself (in its helo) as "COLOSSUS"

Mod this chap up

[BlightThePower]

I think my parent post has some of the mod points that are owing more to this chap. Thanks.

Is it legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, they are building access circumvention devices, which are illegal under DMCA.

What does the 'D' in D-day mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they called it the A-Day, Z-Day, or even F-day?

P.S. 'F' is for final, you perverts!

Re:What does the 'D' in D-day mean?

[PoorLenore]

Apparently the 'D' stands for 'day'. Try here: http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/2004_dday _why.html (Remove any spaces in URL, as necessary.) (Frankly if you can't trust Tony and the Team, who can you trust? This recommendation, of course, may mean nothing to non-UK TV viewers.)

Ob. funny comment

[6digitdotter]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!

No 5 is (almost) alive ~ CSIRAC

[goon]

CSIRAC - (1949 - 1961) - digital computer, entire machine housed at melbourne museum (victoria, australia) after service with CSIRO ( formerly called CSIR), Radio physics lab Sydney University finally residing at Melbourne University.

Interesting facts ...

• approx 5th digital computer created
• 
  
  one of last original computers intact
  CSIR Mk1 or CSIRAC designed by team lead by Maston Beard and Trevor Pearcey for CSIR (CSIRO)
  primary store of 768 20-bit words
  magnetic drum 4,096 word capacity
  10ms access time
  clock speed 1000Hz
  serial bus
  paper tape input
  30 KW power requirement
  crt output of registers
  high level programming via language INTERPROGRAM
  audio output for errors
  first computer programmed for music
  emululator available
  

references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRAC
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac/csirac.html
story on recreations of some of the original music tracks CSIRAC
50th Anniversary of the CSIRAC

Details of the tubes...

[SHiFTY1000]

IIRC, the Collossus uses about 1500 EF37A tubes. These are very low current, very low noise signal pentode. They run at about 250V / 3mA. They were widely used in audio gear including the Leak TL12 and so on.

I use Mullard EF37A input tubes in an audio amp I built. They are quite beautiful looking as seen here: www.r-type.org/exhib/aad0108.htm

More cool tubes stuff at www.diyaudio.com in the tube forum.

Ha! I thought it was talking about this:

[pixel.jonah]

the colossus

Re:A tragedy -- more famous, 'obsolete' technology

[iamcf13]

The Lockheed SR-71./a>

It is now 'out of print' for security reasons per link above. I guess all the brainpower that went into it will be lost in the interest of national security once all the Blackbirds are utterly scrapped or are (heavily guarded) museum pieces.... =/

Re:Are we "celebrating" D-Day now?

[thrash242]

Exactly. Noone is celebrating the fact that lots of people died. The fact that it was the single largest amphibious assault *ever* and that it worked, leading to the allied liberation of Europe (including Germany: many of the people/soldiers there just wanted the hell out of the war, but Hitler wouldn't let them) and the freeing of all the people in concentration/death camps. That is worth celebrating/remembering IMHO.

If it had failed, the war would have dragged on probably until the discovery and use of an atomic bomb on Germany. Japan almost kept fighting after two such bombs. I think that Hitler, in his megalomania, would have kept Germany fighting until the very end or until he was dead(obviously). Also, think about how many more people would have died in concentration camps in that time.

When I was a kid and I heard the term "D-Day" I assumed it was a bad day as well, as I assumed the "D" stood for "Doom". Later when I learned about history, I realized that it was a good day.