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Colossus has been Rebuilt

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the no-not-the-one-in-sardia dept.

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."

4 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Reminder: by JessLeah · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...)

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    Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
    1. Re:Reminder: by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

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      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  2. Re:A tragedy by Polkyb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
  3. Really the First 'Computer'? by Geiger581 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.