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

The Forbin Project

[Seumas]

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

Colossus of Rhodes

[The Original Yama]

When I read the headline I thought it was about the Colossus of Rhodes!

This is cool too :)

Re:Colossus of Rhodes

[ComaVN]

Yeah, good for trade, but that is obsoleted by electricity, so why would anyone want to build that now.

(sigh)

[Lobo_Louie]

... and the IRS still uses it to this day.

Reminder:

[JessLeah]

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...)

Re:Reminder:

[Short Circuit]

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)

good design

[millahtime]

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.

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

[Polkyb]

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.

Re:A tragedy

[CdBee]

It was destroyed so other countries would never find out we could break their ciphers. It still needed to be secret after WW2

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...

Re:A tragedy

[PapayaSF]

You're almost right. They did get tons of silver (not all of it) to make electromagnets (not just wire), which were so huge and powerful that when turned on, people standing many yards away could feel the pull on the nails in their shoes and on their belt buckles!

Re:Free information.

[meringuoid]

If information about this machine had been made public in the years after the war, we may now have been a good few megahertz ahead of our selves in computer technology.

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 :-)

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:Support Bletchley Park

[pjacobi]

Often forgotten (outside Poland):

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/an gielski /NR20.htm#Conquerors%20of%20Enigma
http://www.awm .gov.au/news/codes.htm
http://wings.buffalo.edu/i nfo-poland/web/history/W WII/enigma/U-571.shtml

Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[salmacis2]

Colossus, and indeed the rest of the Bletchley Park operation was a tremendous example of war-time ingenuity.

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.

Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park!

[pklong]

Oh great, a load of Slashdotters turning up. I can just imagine the poor guides when they ask the obligatory "Does anyone have any questions?".

Also they had better rope off the area properly or for some reason the machine will print out "Visit my 1337 site goatse" or "First Post" constantly.

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.

Really the First 'Computer'?

[Geiger581]

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.

Re:Free information.

[ezzzD55J]

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...

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:

He got a bit more specific about two things: the agency didn't particularly care about the M-209. What they did care about was that the method that Reeds had discovered was applicable to systems that were in current use by particular governments, and that even though it was hard to imagine that these people would find the paper and relate it to their own operations (which used commercially-available crypto machines), still... perhaps we should exercise discretion? It was certainly legal to publish, but publication might cause difficulties for some people in the agency.

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.

intersting book on colossus...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my grad school professors wrote a detailed book on colossus as a project to keep him busy in retirement.

"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/-/09 74 304506/qid=1086095280/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-610257 7-9835954?v=glance&s=books

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.

Re:Not really

[arevos]

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.

Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here

[Moraelin]

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.

Brit RSA encrytion

[BlightThePower]

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.

Re:Brit RSA encrytion

[Ernesto Alvarez]

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.

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.

Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun

[garyok]

I would have added

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?