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

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

[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...

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: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: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.