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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
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
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.
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.
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/
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