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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."
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...)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
There is also a wikipedia article about the Colossus computer , perhaps more relevant.
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.
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers. It still needed to be secret after WW2
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
This is the real one!. Ignore the other ones, this is the REAL wikipedia link. Verify it for yourself!
FWIW, the film ENIGMA is a romanticized but entertaining thriller about another important, earlier (than Colossus), Bletchley Park decryption mechanism.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
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.
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.
That was classic intercourse!
One of my grad school professors wrote a detailed book on colossus as a project to keep him busy in retirement.
9 74 304506/qid=1086095280/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-610257 7-9835954?v=glance&s=books
"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/-/0
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.
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 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).
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.
Often forgotten (outside Poland):
n gielski /NR20.htm#Conquerors%20of%20Enigmam .gov.au/news/codes.htmi nfo-poland/web/history/W WII/enigma/U-571.shtml
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/a
http://www.aw
http://wings.buffalo.edu/
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"
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.
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.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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...
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
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.
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.
GPG 0x1B479C78