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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."
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
When I read the headline I thought it was about the Colossus of Rhodes!
:)
This is cool too
OLPC Australia
... and the IRS still uses it to this day.
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
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.
Evolution or ID?
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 :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There is also a wikipedia article about the Colossus computer , perhaps more relevant.
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?
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
This is the real one!. Ignore the other ones, this is the REAL wikipedia link. Verify it for yourself!
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Fatal error on tape0 - unknown error, paper exploded?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
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)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
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?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
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?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.