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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."

14 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. The Forbin Project by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  2. (sigh) by Lobo_Louie · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. 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...)

    --
    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)

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  4. A tragedy by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.
    1. 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.

      --
      I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
    2. Re:A tragedy by eggoeater · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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...

      --
      $7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
  5. Re:Colossus of Rhodes by ComaVN · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
  6. Support Bletchley Park by fantomas · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

  7. Re:A modern PC could emulate it in physics! by MancDiceman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Go and visit Bletchley Park! by pklong · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --

    Philip

    Signatures are broken

  9. 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.

  10. Re:Free information. by ezzzD55J · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  11. Re:Not really by arevos · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.