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The Machines That Sparked the Beginning of the Computer Age
jjp9999 writes "A war of spies and electromechanical machines that took place beneath the wires during World War II not only played a crucial role in the Allies' victory, but also helped spark the beginning of the computer age. Among the devices was the Enigma, a cipher capable of producing 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible code combinations, and a hulking machine, the Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer, capable of decoding the Enigma."
What were they thinking!
Seriously, everyone who is a computer geek/nerd/dork/wannabe knows this.
In these discussions it is common to overlook Sigaba, the American encryption machine that was significantly more secure than Enigma.
Electronic Cipher Machine (ECM) Mark II
Cryptanalysis of the SIGABA --- 3.4 Stepping Maze
The Germans that beat their heads against it referred to it as, "The big machine".
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I hope 4chan is not down long. I hate to think what those "people" would do to the rest of the net
Well, you're forgetting insignificant parts where Germans invaded France and the USSR, committing crimes that make every other genocide pale in comparison.
Mod down...
Why do I suspect the above is a goatse link?
Well, logically- oh, nice tin foil hat. All makes sense now. Carry on.
Damn! Mod this fucker to hell
Table-ized A.I.
In other news, Superman comics paved the way for other comics, Thomas Edison was a really awesome inventor, and the quantum world is often strange.
Seriously, how did this get on to the main page. There is no NEWS here...
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
IIRC Colossus was used to break the Lorenz ciphers, not Enigma. BP were using the Bombs with menus for Enigma.
Sadly, while the poster is clearly trolling with his deliberately lopsided history, the US did put well over 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. These camps, while offering better conditions in most respects, bore far too close a resemblance to concentration camps for anyone with a conscience. look it up is you need to know more.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Don't worry. There are lots of places on the internet for 24 year old basement dwellers to talk about childrens' toys and Japanese childrens' television.
Haters gonna hate. I don't judge you for doing whatever the fuck it is you do, so leave my anime out of this.
also, apparently you can the internet on computers now [Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net]
If I wasn't completely sure that you are a lying troll, I would correct your mistake and say you probably meant internment camps
Get a grip on a dictionary. An "internment camp" is the same thing as a "concentration camp", neither requires torture, slave labour, or genocide for the term to be applicable. However both require the prisoners to be selected on the basis of ethincity and/or political persuassion.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Colossus was listed, but why not Colosson?
For those who want to do a bit more reading on the subject (of the Bombe machines, Colossus, etc.), there's Colussus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret by P. Gannon.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm more interrested in an open source command line tool, with decoding abilities.
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
Really?
Japan's seizure of Manchuria and invasion of China wasn't a provocation? The rape of Nanking? 22 million Chinese civilans killed vs 960,000 Japanese civilians dead makes the allies the villains?
How about the Jews and Gypsies killed by Germany, that's surely the fault of the allies.
Link is self portrait of slashpotter.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Connections - Episode 4 - "Faith in Numbers"
It's not just anime when it involves child porn and mutilated corpses in between a thousand memes that most sane people can't fucking stand anymore.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
I don't judge anybody, but you have to admit some of them go way to far and can be scary.
who the hell wants to be a computer?
factor 966971: 966971
Deal with it.
Sure is a good thing those nice Germans didn't target any civilians.
Oh, wait, we're back in the real world here! The sad part is, I'm not even entirely sure you're trolling. The Americans didn't have entirely clean hands in the whole affair. Very few countries have fought a major war without doing some things they've later come to regret, one good reason not to have the damn things. And the internment camps were a travesty, but they pale beside Auschwitz or Birkenau. The majority of Japanese-Americans who were put into internment camps did, at least, come out of them alive, and weren't sent there with the deliberate purpose of mass slaughter.
That doesn't by any means make it right. But it's nothing like the Holocaust.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
We called them "Reservations".
Except that reservation don't have walls or fences nor does the US have internal passports (like the Soviet Union did) restricting travel out of the reservations.
Reservations have their own tribal law for everything from traffic to misdemeanors while Federal Law deals with Felonies.
http://files.sharenator.com/trollface_1_RE_The_Keyboard_Game-s469x428-168082-580.jpg
The unfortunate inclusion of decoding algorithms taken from John Dee's manuscripts - possibly with apocryphal additions by Edward Kelly - cause ... "malfunctions" which continue to plague classically named supercomputers up to the present day. We need only to remember what happened to the movie COLOSSUS computer, the HECTOR, The PROTEUS ... not to mention others. ;)
That's the case now, but back when the reservations were set up, they were absolutely analogous to concentration camps. Entire civilizations were rounded up and sent on a death march to tiny parcels of low-value land, resulting in obscene high mortality rates. If it were done today, it would rightfully be called ethnic cleansing.
I'm not at all the sort to hate on America -- modern day Americans are in no way responsible for the actions of people living close to two centuries ago. Heck, while I don't know the statistics, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of Americans aren't even descended from the English settlers who were living here back then. But we do need to acknowledge that what was done was wrong.
I love how you weeabos call it "anime" instead of what it really is, a cartoon. It's like you're trying to disguise the fact that you watch shit that's made for kids.
GOATSE : Do not open link
All I care about WW2 is that the Germans gassed/baked a bunch of Jews, the Russians crushed the Germans, the Japanese proved they were dishonorable cowards and the USA nuked the shit out of Japan for it. Anything else is irrelevant.
While Colossus may have been capable of breaking Enigma (though it is not sure, as it was a highly specialized computer), it was actually used for breaking another, more sophisticated cipher produced by a Lorenz-made machine connected to a telex machine. When encoding, the telex machine emitted a 5-bit code, which was encrypted using the Lorenz machine. For decoding the process was reversed. This type of traffic was called Fish or Tunny in Bletchley Park.
Amazingly the article omits to tell us about Konrad Zuze:
"Konrad Zuse (German pronunciation: [knat tsuz]; 22 June 1910 Berlin – 18 December 1995 Hünfeld near Fulda) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941. He received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964 for the Z3.[1] Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the Nazi German Government.[2]
Zuse's S2 computing machine is considered to be the first process-controlled computer. In 1946, he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül.[3] Zuse founded one of the earliest computer businesses on 1 April 1941 (Zuse Ingenieurbüro und Apparatebau).[4] This company built the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
'cause the same guy's been posting those links for a few days at least.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
There was one "death march", the Trail of Tears, that only affects the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole.
The only other forced relocations in the history of the United States were General Order No. 11 (1863), the Japanese, German and Italian internments in World War Two and removal of the Aleutian Islanders in World War Two.
It wasn't just "English settlers" who were living back then, English, German, Dutch, Scottish and Irish.
My European ancestors got here in 1631 and 1895, my American Indian ancestors got here, oh about 10-45,000 years ago.
I'm from an Indian Reservation, studied the American Indian Wars in grad school and nothing I've experienced or learned tells me that anything the Americans did to the American Indians was any worse than what the American Indians had done to each other for thousands of years.
How can something that's just ink, colour and imagination "go way too far"? It's not like anyone's forcing people to see it. Not that I watch a lot of anime, but still.
Emotions! In your brain!
He's also right about the US de facto starting the war against Japan. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the US had given Japan an ultimatum which was technically impossible to comply with. Basically, it demanded full and immediate withdrawal of all Japanese forces from Indochina by the end of the year, which was clearly logistically impossible (how long as the US taken to withdraw from Iraq now?). The Japanese interpreted this as war being impossible to avoid, and attacked Perl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, where the US really was building a war machine for attacking Japan. So they weren't wrong about that.
This seems to be a reoccurring tactic by the United States - a similarly impossible ultimatum was given to Saddam Hussein, where it was demanded that he prove that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and proving a large scale negative is, of course, quite impossible.
One can only speculate in why the US uses this tactic - it certainly won't fool the people the ultimatum is given to, nor historians. My personal speculation is that it's meant to fool the US population, in order to gain popular support, and may even be fairly successful at that.
Anyhow, it's at this point just an interesting historical footnote. The war happened, and US trickery doesn't in any way detract from the war crimes done by the adversaries, nor exonerate their actions.
Colossus was not developed to decrypt Enigma traffic; it was developed to assist in decryption of a much more complex German cipher called "Tunny" by the Brits.
A german engineer started out in computer-technology way before that and without any military-driven background. Konrad Zuse was a pioneer. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse)
What about the german Z series computers? They were the first working example ...
Wow. Most of the time I love the crazy shit on the Internet, but the ignorance in this thread is appalling, even by Internet standards.
... invented by AFRICANS, isn't it...
There is evidence that some of the first computers ever produced existed as far back as 150 BC, A device found in 1901, called the Antikythera mechanism, is a mechanical computing device believed to have been used to chart astronomical positions. It's overall design rivals the complexity of an early mechanical watch.
Another fun item, the japanese Karakuri ningy, or clockwork doll. They are some of the earliest known examples of robotics, going back to the 17th century. The Karakuri ningy was primarily used by wealthy dignitaries for ceremonial purposes, like serving tea. One of these clockwork doll would be placed upon a table, holding up a small tray. When a weighted object, such as a tea cup, was placed on the tray, the weight of the object would set the mechanics in motion, causing the doll to turn 180 degrees from the server and would then begin walking toward the guest at the other side of the table, to deliver the tea. Once the weight was removed from the tray, the action stopped and the mechanism would reset itself for the next use... allowing both server and guest to repeatedly serve each other as a form of entertainment.
Although much of this has been replaced by electronic devices, such as the Sony Aibo and the Honda Asimo, the old style Karakuri ningy design is still in use today, but mostly as large scale devices in factory settings as carts for moving large, heavily-weighted objects, like car engines to different parts of an assembly line, as a cheap way to conserve power by using an object's own weight to move it.
8==8 Bones 8==8
A few bits of truth floating in a frothing stew of errors.
As noted elsewhere, COLOSSUS was not used to break Enigma; it was designed to break the cipher of the Lorenz machine (Geheimschreiber). If the Allies had needed COLOSSUS to break Enigma, the war would have been much longer and bloodier. COLOSSUS was not even operational until February 1944. The Allies had re-broken Enigma in early 1940, by hand methods. They read the main Luftwaffe key (RED) from then until the end of the war. They read the main navy key (HYDRA) from mid-1941 on. In 1942, the Germans adopted a special high-quality key for U-boats only (TRITON) which was not broken for 10 months (during which the Battle of the Atlantic was nearly lost). TRITON was finally broken by Turing himself.
Use of the Enigma machine did not "spread through the German military". Enigma was adopted as the standard cipher machine for all branches of the German armed forces by 1929.
The "Turing Machine" was not "one of the earliest modern computers", it is a theoretical model of a computing device.
The Germans did not "[strengthen] their system by changing the cipher every day.” They had more than one "cipher" - more precisely, each branch or sub-branch of service had its own daily settings for the Enigma (its "key"). There were about 50 Enigma keys in use by the end of the war.
ULTRA was the code term for any intelligence from decrypted enemy signals. Enigma signals were not decrypted with COLOSSUS - nor with the electromechanical "bombes" used to crack Enigma. The function of the bombes was to find the settings for a key. The key-finding process tested settings against a "crib": ciphertext for which the cleartext was known or guessable. The testing went on until a setting produced the expected cleartext. Then all messages on that key could be decoded using a copy of the Enigma.
The article is a muddled retelling of stuff that has been known for many years. As others have written, it's not fit for SlashDot.
We called them "Reservations".
In Australia, the concentration camps were called "missions" - and run by christian missionaries.
It's strange that an article with that headline says nothing about the postwar period. So here's what's missing.
In the UK, Colossus was kept secret after the war. But the knowledge gained in its construction was used to develop the first British postwar computers (the Manchester Baby, an experimental design, leading to the Ferranti Mk.1 commercial computer). Alan Turing and others who were involved with Colossus worked on the Manchester series.
In the US, ENIAC was commissioned by the Army for ballistics calculations.
As far as I can find on short notice, the Americans didn't use computers in their WW2 codebreaking efforts.
suck a dick, little faggot
Whenever this debate kicks off both sides start listing things the other did wrong, but there are two important points that are usually overlooked.
1. All parties did regrettable things. Internment/POW camps, bombing civilian targets with incendiaries and nukes, maltreatment and disregard for human rights and the Geneva Convention, sending soldiers on suicide missions... You can argue that one side was worse than the other, which is certainly true, but the real question is did the situation at the time justify those actions?
2. At the time most people in Germany were not aware of the holocaust, most Japanese were not aware of the abuse going on in China, most Americans were not aware of the atomic bombings or the nature of life in internment camps. Accusing ordinary citizens of being guilty of supporting those actions is unfair. In fact it is the justification used by the 7/7 London bombers, which to my mind made little sense because most people were against the wars they were accused of supporting. 2 million of us even marched against them... But anyway, the situations that lead to these things are complicated and they were usually kept secret until after they had happened.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Another precursor of computer development is Konrad Zuse and his work on his Z serie of machine (a series of binary floating point computer with increasing programability, reaching peak with the Z3 being Turing complete).
It's interesting because unlike all the precursors mentioned in TFA, it was not some secret monster developed by intelligence services to crack codes, but a publicly available project with practical industrial applications (to ease the massive calculation in some engineering fields).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Sadly, while the poster is clearly trolling with his deliberately lopsided history, the US did put well over 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. These camps, while offering better conditions in most respects, bore far too close a resemblance to concentration camps for anyone with a conscience. look it up is you need to know more.
Have you ever heard of the German American Bund? It was one of several organizations of German Americans in the 1930s-40s. It was a significant pro-Nazi force in the United States. If you watch this video, you will think your eyes are tricking you. But yes, that is the United States, and yes, the giant figure you can see in the back of some of the stages is George Washington. Was the Bund potentially dangerous? How could the government not believe it was a possibility? There were a large number of reports of "Fifth Columnists , such as the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps in Czechoslovakia, and the Selbstschutz in Poland that aided the German invaders. There were similar reports out of Norway, Denmark, and other places.
This is Time magazines description of how things looked in 1940 as the US watched country after country fall to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy and be brutalized in a terrible fashion.
I've heard a report that 60,000 Germans & German Americans were arrested, and apparently at least 10,000 were held in camps. There may have been more. This story doesn't seem to get much attention, and the documents seem to be harder to come by.
As to the Japanese, there were many of them that, like the Germans, also had patriotic organizations tying them to Japan.
From: Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial Ignores Wartime Realities
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
the real 'pioneers of computers' were the Census machines, and the vast bureaucracies like the Social Security Administration.
and yes, even the machines in the Nazi concentration camps, which IBM Germany worked on.
dare i mention that the Soviet Union was a huge punch card customer through the 1930s?
and that punch card machines are, well, basically, like gigantic electromechanical SQL devices?
oh, and the Japanese fascists were pretty good customers too.
ahhh
but of course, lets forget about all that. everyone knows the first computers were codebreakers built to help stop hitler. yay us.
Sadly yet another article that talks about collossus and seems to give all the credit to Alan Turing without mentioning the contribution of Tommy Flowers :(
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
I have 9 of them in a row. I read result in Hex. It had error detection!!! VEry advanced. 9th bit.
It was designed to break the next German threat: encrypted radio teleprinter traffic...the Germans' version of SIGABA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
The Enigma may have had 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 encodings which were theoretically possible before it was built, but, the actual real Enigma machines had quite a bit less. They had 3 rotors each with 26 positions and those three rotors were chosen (with some specific order) from a larger set of at most 7 (differing numbers depending on when in the war we're talking about and which branch of the German military). In addition, they used up to 2 patch cables. This gives a total number of possible encodings for a real Enigma machine of 26*26*26 (rotor postions) * 7*6*5 (rotor selection) * 26*25/2 (first patch) * 24*23/2 (second patch) / 2 (adjustment for the patch cables being interchangeable in the order) = 165,539,556,000 actual possible encodings at best (and less than that through most of the war due to smaller numbers of rotors being used). This is a lot, but, for example, not so many that you can't carry out a brute-force attack, which is exactly what the allies did. The bigger number from the article is only sensible so long as the rotor layout remains secret, which it didn't as some of the machines fell into allied hands.
In short, it's confusing the design space (possible choices at design time) with the key (parts which can be changed while in use). It's like calculating the number of encodings for DES by assuming that any S-Boxes could be chosen. The Enigma machine was a particular machine, not the set of all possible similar rotor machines which could have been manufactured.
WTF you fucking asshole.
However, its existence asks a big question - did the Roman Empire hold technical progress up for nearly 1500 years? It seems likely that it was the Roman takeover of the Hellenic world that put paid to the skills and thought needed to produce things like this. The maker(s) of the Antikythera mechanism were as skilled as Galileo, and about as capable astronomically. The Romans were militarily effective, but otherwise uncivilised, like the Normans.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...and a whole lot of others. Turing would the last person to approve - he was notably modest about his own contributions. Flowers' contribution was that of a technology enabler - he identified ways that thermionic valves (tubes) could be made reliable (the main one being not switching the heaters on and off.) This was a very important contribution - but without Tutte, Turing and Newman there would have been nothing to contribute to.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The father-in-law of a close friend of mine worked as a technician for the Post Office in England in 1939. Late that year he was transferred to an unnamed organization at an undisclosed location, and for the next six years left home each morning and returned each evening. He had strict instructions to never say anything about his work to anyone. In 1946 he returned to his prewar job with the Post Office, and worked there until he retired in 1965. On his last day at the Post Office an unidentified man showed up and presented him with a gold watch, saying it was "for services to the Nation". He died about seven years later without ever telling anyone in his family anything about his wartime work.
too close a resemblance to concentration camps
Nonsense. Show me the ovens for the cremation of murdered humans and you might have a point. Indeed, I believe the Japanese detainees were regularly fed.
The Japanese internment camps were a gross abuse of power for suspect personal gain, a travesty of civil rights for US citizens, and of very questionable strategic gain. But to give them the moral equivalence of the Nazi-run concentration camps is historical revisionist bs.
--
$tar -xvf
From the article: "Work on the bombe was handed to Alan Turing, who was developing a concept of a computing device, the Turing Machine, capable of performing rapid calculations. " Don't you just love technical writing in the media?
very interesting... i wonder what other old machines used punch cards?
the player piano surely can't have been the only thing between the jacquard loom and the Census machine in the 1890s.
And what about Conrad Zuse?
He invented what we would call a computer before all the others...
Probably will never be known. I have - on and off - over time, been cobbling together bits and pieces (some experience, some plagiarism and some wit) to try to make a storyline - hopefully one that kids will find engaging. You can find it here... (http://eclecticplanet.org). I welcome constructive criticism, and some good humours. David DelMonte
Actually, cartoons ARE made for kids, i.e. those under 18 (hell, under 12, let's be real here), however, Anime CAN be oriented towards a more mature audiance. No, I dont' mean porn, just more mature. Porn cartoons are Mangas. :)
Stone
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Can thoroughly recommend a visit to http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/ which also houses The National Museum of Computing http://www.tnmoc.org/ Of the codes generated by the 12 different ENIGMA-type machines used by the Germans, 2 were never broken. And finally, the museum is used as an intreresting location for corporate events and weddings.