Slashdot Mirror
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."
Posted from my very own Colossus
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
Seriously, look it up. Britain declared war on Germany on behalf of an "ally" (Poland) that she had no intention of helping. Bomber Harris proceeded to intentionally target "enemy" civilians, hiding the fact from the air crews, thus proving that he knew it was a war crime and against international law. America unleashed an unprecedented series of provocations, leading to Japan declaring war. America followed this up by a war of aggression, putting Americans that looked like Japanese into concentration camps. White Americans invented new weapons of mass destruction and used them against nonwhites. The Onion put it best: "Nagasaki bombed 'for the hell of it': second bomb would have just 'sat around anyway'.
What, unfamiliar with this narrative? Have you attended a university history course in the last twenty years? My guess is: not.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
First calculator based on a microprocessor, the intel 4004 comes to mind. I am very lucky to own one of these!
Mod down...
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.
Its first microprocessor, and has a calculator based on it. It has its schematics published! and emulator I am very very lucky to own one of original calculators based on this processor.
IIRC Colossus was used to break the Lorenz ciphers, not Enigma. BP were using the Bombs with menus for Enigma.
also, apparently you can the internet on computers now [Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net]
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.
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"
who the hell wants to be a computer?
factor 966971: 966971
My food collection is getting big...
Favorites: ... new account to post that ... what a douche!"
"Ugh. Goatse. NSFW. Asshole (poster and picture, both)."
"Seriously
"You're a fucking douchbag." - "That is the most accurate comment yet"
"I hope you die in a fire before you are old enough to contaminate the gene pool."
"Death to all assholes - Let's put you first into the guillotine"
"Asshole... Ginormous asshole, in fact."
"Ugh. Goatse. You asshole."
"Better than you, you arse bandit."
Hate:
"I hate your guts."
"Damn! Mod this fucker to hell"
"Fucking troll, do not click there"
"It would be more interesting if I had a piece of pipe and your face, in close proximity so I could smash your face beyond recognition,"
"You fucker" - "I had the same thought as you. What a fucking asshole. The link is nsfw."
"Bravo teeny bopper. You're a really mature mother fucker (or do you prefer father fucking? Damn you homo erotic shittter)."
"Wait! I think I hear your mommy calling to give your tongue a good soap washing. And maybe she'll execute you too"
"You fucking piece of shit!" , "You sorry piece of shit." , "You cunt.", "Fuck you."
"It's because of Assholes like you that I can no longer trust URL shorteners"
"I did not even bother to look, but this same idiot has been doing this for weeks now. Fuck off asshole."
"What a retard..... enough said...."
Funny:
"Didn't click it, but the magic 8-ball says goatse."
"Thanks, I'm reading slashdot in class like a good student and just got tubgirl'd."
"not gonna click it to find out, but I'd be surprised if parent's link wasn't goatse... It appears you would be correct sir. Why oh why do I always forget.."
"Watching second monitor, there was something wrong with the other screen. Control + w. Phew..."
"Doh! One has to also recognize data urls. *sigh*"
"That's somewhat clever, but some of us do know what base-64 encoding is."
"Can you not afford normal entertainment?"
"Hey family! Come look! They're opening the Google Talk client! Now, click here...... (sees goatse)"
"I tried to post warnings about the goaste loving jerk yesterday but was modded into oblivion as a karma whore"
"Turn on TinyUrl previews. It saves lives."
"Posting your picture online again?"
"Really? Are you not tired of this yet?"
"High likelyhood of being a Goatse link. Proceed with caution"
Emotion:
"i WAS eating lunch you ass!"
"Oh dear god my eyes. Haven't seen THAT awful image in a while."
"My eyes are burning... argh! Damn you!"
"MY EYES... dude i am at work here "S "
"WARNING: Don't click on the parent's link! Damn goatse! The first I experienced, no less.
"Oh goddammit. I didn't need that right before bed."
"goatse warning! I'm still recovering."
Frustration: /. "
"Can someone make a fucking goatse blocker firefox plugin please? This is pissing me off now."
"I am sick and tired of that crap on
Philosophy:
"Why the sudden coordinated campaign for Goatse? Is someone making money off this?"
"You're right, this is the most coordinated troll campaign in a long time. Multiple accounts, multiple pages."
"Urgh...dammit, am I the only one thinking the goatse trolls are getting worse lately than they have been in the past five years?"
"Who found a way to monetize goatse at this late date? If we got half the effort of that campaign on real stuff we'd all have better software by now."
"Boy Goatsex is out in force today... - Every topic is littered with them..."
"You can't actually expect the Slashdot users to actually know enough not to respond to a goatse troll, right ?"
"Can we start banning people who post that hiding it behind a url shortening link like goo.gl?"
Admiration:
"You are one dedicated troll."
"Well played, sir. Well played."
"A link that redirects to a page containing goatse? How clever of you!"
"Congrats. It's been a long time since I saw goatse."
"Thank you for th
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. ;)
GOATSE : Do not open link
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
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 ...
... 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.
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.
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 ]
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.
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.
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
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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.