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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."
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
Well, you're forgetting insignificant parts where Germans invaded France and the USSR, committing crimes that make every other genocide pale in comparison.
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?
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.
Connections - Episode 4 - "Faith in Numbers"
who the hell wants to be a computer?
factor 966971: 966971
We called them "Reservations".
Thomas Edison was a really awesome inventor
Thomas A. Edison was a really awesome businessman, opportunist, and quite possibly the world's first patent troll. Very few of the inventions he has been credited for were actually invented by him, the person. Sometimes by employees of Edison, and sometimes these were foreign inventions, bought or outright filched, and then patented in the US by Edison.
Thomas Edison was a really awesome inventor
No, he wasn't. You've fallen for the hype (mostly created by Thos. Edison himself).
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
Just this weekend I learned via a BBC documentary that the only reason Hollywood exists was because of the desire of New York filmmakers to get as far away as possible from Edison's patent enforcement (often through the use of hired goons to smash up equipment).
I found it interesting that in the history of two of the biggest forms of mass media, recorded sound and cinema, Edison was there at the outset, yet his aggressive pursuit of patent infringement meant that people were forced to look elsewhere and his products failed to become the dominant technology. A lesson for modern patent trolls.
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
it would have been more helpful if I gave the exact link... http://eclecticplanet.org/tech/computer/