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Second World War Code-cracking Computing Hero Colossus Turns 70
DW100 writes "The Colossus computer that helped the Allies crack messages sent by the Nazis during the Second World War has celebrated its 70th birthday. The machine was a pioneering feat of engineering, able to read 5,000 characters a second to help the team at Bletchley Park crack the German's Lorenz code in rapid time. This helped the Allies gather vital information on the Nazi's plans, and is credited with helping end the war effort early, saving millions of lives."
More like movin' on out to Reddit and Ars if they follow through with the threat to force us onto Beta.
Fuck Beta.
live fast die young
the slashdot beta sucks
The machine at Bletchley Park is a working replica, not the original.
The Nazis would've won if the Allies used Colossus Beta.
Beta Sucks Hilter's Balls.
Dice have done far worse than kill Slashdot, they've hurt Slashdot and they intent to go on hurting Slashdot. They'll leave it marooned for all eternity in the centre of a dead fanbase ... Buried in whitespace ... Buried in whitespace ... Buried in whitespace.
Your ad here.
As could have the British, French, Soviets and the German populace themselves. Blaming the Americans is slightly silly.
Only, it wasn't a computer in the modern parlance of being general purpose, programmable, and Turling-complete. It was more like an advanced calculator, that only worked for a single job.
Also, Beta sucks.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
That's just freaky, I just finished re-reading "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson last night and this story pops up.
Not just answers, the correct questions.
Just look at what the Brit's old-school equivalents led to in how they treated him after he played a critical role in helping the Allies win WW2.
Sorry if this seems off-topic, but this is Alan Turing I'm talking about here, and the two most salient pieces of his life were his maths and his ability to both dream beyond his peers, and his ability to make it absolutely practical where needed, and his sexual orientation. This ability with maths is rare to see, and how the British establishment saw fit to overlook this, punish him for his gayness, and ultimatly drive him to suicide is a deep lesson in just how much of a bunch of arseholes people can be even to the best of us.
John_Chalisque
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Nazis' not Nazi's
FFS
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
as in, BETA (currently, goatse.cx is admittedly easier on the eye, but, whatever..)
OR
CLASSIC?
- not that we all know what wouldn't happen eventually, but *forcing* people onto that, fuggedit.
The Guardians at this nonsense at the mo as well now, currently.. ..getting to the stage, only readable site left will be the internet archive.
Oh no!! They going to lose an Anonymous Coward. Quick everyone to the Situation Room!!!!!!!!!!!
Action speaks louder than words guys and gals.. so lets boycott Slashdot for 1 week starting Monday 10th, ending Monday 17th! If you're serious about leaving now is your chance to show your intention. Maybe hurting Dice's pockets will help them listen to their users.
Lets stop this launch dead in its tracks.. spread the word!
That's just millions more who would be here today to suffer through SLASHBETA. Hope knowing this helps your sentiment.
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook.
Alan Turing was a indeed a colossus but he didn't crack the enigma code. He didn't even lay a lot of of the ground work for designing this machine, it was a team of mathematicians working for Polish military intelligence after Polish and French spooks had gained access various data concerning Enigma that included inspecting a working copy of an enigma machine. Their names were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki and Henryk Zygalski and they reverse engineered the Enigma based on this material using mathematics and created what they called the 'bomba kryptologiczna'. The famous Colossus was a 'substantial develpment' from this device. What Alan Turing and Co. did was crack the improved enigma machines (still a daunting task) who had been upgraded in 1938-39, but he and and his team stood on the shoulders of those three polish mathematicians. The British are very keen to take sole credit for cracking Enigma but they got a whole helluva lot of help from Poland and France and as a German I'd like it to be crystal clear to the world who exactly it was that kicked our cryptographic ass :-)
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The one additional value that slashdot can provide is the quality of the discussions. If they do away with it I will leave.
Fuck The Beta
This may look a little contrived, but the new management team at Bletchley Park also seem to wish to "improve" things by making them worse.
For example, they recently sacked a long-time volunteer guide because he insisted on showing guests the nearby National Museum of Computing, (which is where the Colossus is replica is actually housed).
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Oh, and double fuck beta....been here for decades, and whilst I'm all for progress the classic site never struck me as broken, (apart from special character support - is that fixed in "beta"? )
The last I heard progress meant IMPROVEMENT. Listening DICE?
I don't see the grey on grey you speak of. My only real issue with the beta format so far is the excessive amount of whitespace. Or perhaps I'm just impartial since I tend to spend more time at Ars (where Slashdot seems to pull a large number of their stories) than here.
Edit: Oh, and the lack of auto-fill for the subject of new comments. Almost forgot about that one.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
Haven't seen the Beta so can't comment.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Fuck Beta.
Have you tried it on a mobile device? It it b0rken.
the two most salient pieces of his life were his maths and his ability to both dream beyond his peers, and his ability to make it absolutely practical where needed, and his sexual orientation.
...with arithmetic skills like yours, it's probably a good thing you have a mathematician as a hero.
That’s a totally dubious opinion misstated as fact.
Without American materiel (lend/lease ships, tanks, bomber aircraft) and manpower (D-Day landings, continental fighting, naval convoys) the war effort would have been almost inevitably lost. This does not mean that the UK mightn’t have eked out a long-term stalemate and perhaps even an uneasy truce, but the defeat of Nazi Germany would have been out of the question. What ultimately defeated Germany was not the war on two fronts, but an expensive, resource-intensive war on two fronts that exceeded the country’s ability to regenerate. Without the virtually bottomless reserves of resources provided by the USA, the USSR would have been eventually brought to heel, and the West would have followed suit.
The USA was pivotal.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
Go easy on him, he probably has a fanatical devotion to the Pope.
I'll come in again.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One thing that I don't get is how the current wave of web site redesigns are actually, in any way, tablet/smart phone friendly.
On a device with a small display concise and space eficient presentation of information, without excess white space or eye candy, is necessary if you don's want to end up feeling like you are peering at the site through a soda straw. Using large fonts, wide line spacing, and lots of white space just makes a small display effectively smaller.
On a device with a low bandwidth or expensive connection reducing the number of bits that needed to render the page is desirable to get the page to render in a reasonable time and cost. This is another reason to eliminate large, eye candy, images.
On a device that may have limited computing power it is desirable to use those resources efficiently, effectively, and only when necessary to deliver the information content of the site,
And, the one sin Slashdot beta hasn't committed, why should I need an app for something that should just display in a browser if the web presence was properly designed?
All your coincidence does is give us a reliable means of estimating how many people out there are reading Cryptonomicon at any given moment in time. It’s not freaky at all. It’s just the consequence of the vast number of humans currently alive.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
The Colossus was useless at decrypting Enigma traffic: that was handled by the electronic bombes.
Colossus was constructed to break Lorenz/Tunny traffic: a much more advanced system designed for encrypting teleprinter five-bit Baudot-code teleprinter transmissions. Dilettantes will harp on Tunny’s greater number of rotors, but it was a far more radical departure than might at first appear. As many subsequent stream-ciphers, Tunny XORed cleartext to a cryptostream. Amongst other things, that meant that there was no restriction against a character in the ciphertext being the same as the corresponding character in the cleartext, a flaw which allowed skilled cryptographers to infer what might, conceivably, be contained within a given stretch of text.
Two sets of ‘wheels’ were summed independently to a five-bit cleartext word. One set was advanced on every word and one advanced only if another wheel’s value was !FALSE (this wheel itself advanced on every word). This meant, amongst other things, that sometimes part of the keystream did not increment, and this in turn had a discernible effect upon the statistical distribution of the difference between successive ciphertext words.
Reconstructing the keystream from these distributions is how Tunny was broken, and that is the task that Colossus was designed to automate. (Mumbling about Colossus’ Turing-Completeness is fundamentally ill-posed, as no machine has the infinite memory capacity envisioned by Turing. I will however emphasise that Colossus lacked a stored program facility, a concept that was only developed much later.)
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
I meant electromechanical bombes.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
Well that and the fact that the US exported entire factories to the USSR to bolster their flagging production and forces. It was those transports that allowed diplomatic pouches containing nuclear secrets to migrate to Stalin in short order (Dark Sun : Richard Rhodes - although, imo, his first book which he won the Pulitzer prize - "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is far superior, Dark Sun is a hell of a peek into the Soviet Nuke program).
You can't blame the British, they kept fighting.
The French on the other hand surrendered.
BTW I haven't gone to the Beta site, but it sounds like shit. Has anyone asked Obama? "If you like your Slashdot classic you can keep it"
That’s a totally dubious opinion misstated as fact.
Without American materiel (lend/lease ships, tanks, bomber aircraft) and manpower (D-Day landings, continental fighting, naval convoys) the war effort would have been almost inevitably lost.
Didn't the Americans manage to sink all the tanks we loaned them on D-Day by launching them too far out at sea? My history book says the British were the only ones who managed to get them ashore (along with the materials to build a prefabricated port so they could dock ships there and get the heavy gear on land).
I also thought the beginning of the end of the war was down to the Russians in Stalingrad. The capture of Berlin was termed a 'race' between the Allies and the Russians (because they both wanted to be the first grab the German tech). The allies won by a matter of hours but it was the Russians who broke through the German lines first.
No sig today...
Pre-empting what, exactly?
No sig today...
See it while you can. If the 'managers' of the Bletchly Park Trust get their way, Colossus and the National Meuseum of Computing will soon be made homeless. Sounds a lot like the /. situation doesn't it?
We've been reading a dozen articles a day (and posts in most of the others) that spying is inexcusable. It's a sad thing that Snowden didn't work in Bletchley Park during WWII, he would have exposed what those evil Brits were up to so the peace loving Nazis could go about their lives.
As we all know, NASA invented the microwave oven as well as the computer. I even doubt such a thing as WWII ever happened, how could we have developed all that technology back then? We didn't even have a satellite yet.
Why did the US need to get involved? From http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/inde...
"My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour.
I believe it is peace for our time...
Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."
Singling out the US demonstrates a lack of understanding of the historical context.
Did Mr. Forbin ever fall in love with Colossus?
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook. --- Alan Turing was a indeed a colossus but he didn't crack the enigma code. He didn't even lay a lot of of the ground work for designing this machine, it was a team of mathematicians working for Polish military intelligence after Polish and French spooks had gained access various data concerning Enigma that included inspecting a working copy of an enigma machine.
The OP DIDNT say anything about cracking enigma (or Lorenz or Tunny).
It talked about advances in COMPUTER technology. That was what Turing was interested in. Codebreaking was always a side-show for him. The main thing was building a 'general-purpose' problem-solving machine. And if you study his work you will find that what he was interested in was producing a creation that could 'think'. A mechanical brain, in other words. And we are now moving steadily along that path, but we haven't reached it yet....
Without lend lease equipment the Russians would have had trouble winning the war. Most important were millions of trucks. This solved one of the USSRs greatest deficiencies: Being able to supply and resupply mobile forces. Each penetration and encirclement would have been much shallower without them, and the soviets would have required longer to mount another offensive. This would have permitted the Germans to be much more effective in the defense.
The true turning point of the War was the battle of Kurks, in the sense that it was after Kursk that the germans handed the initiative over the the Soviets and spent the rest of war retreating.
It has been said, though I don't recall by whom, that the war was won with Soviet blood paid for by American gold.
Without the heavy pressure placed on the Germans by the eastern front, the invasion of Normandy and Western front would have faced far more opposing forces. If the Soviets were unable to break back into Belorussia, the Germans would have been able to consolidate many more of their holdings and had far more resources at their disposal. Shipping the Soviets vast numbers of Studebaker trucks, Willie Jeeps, boots, uniforms, Air craft, locomotives and rail carse made a big difference. In fact, two thirds of the Red Army trucks were American built.
I love ACs who make these inflammatory statements without any knowledge on the subject. The German war machine was allowed to grow because of the complacence of its neighbors. Throughout the Nazi regime before there was any aggression there were treaty violations that none of Germany's neighbors did anything about. Was it up to the US to deal with that? If you have a guy building a war machine in the house next door the time to stop it is when you first see it, not let him build it to see how good it looks in final paint. There was also ample time for the European leaders to see just how effective the German war machine was in the Spanish Civil War, did anybody not see the German Air and Armored divisions not go into Spain in 1936 to support Franco? It was all training folks for Germany, live fire no doubt, but still training and when Germany was finally ready there wasn't much that could stop them except a little strip of ocean. That was also 4 years before the invasion of Poland. When war finally did break out the US did lend its support, in March 1941 the Lend Lease act was passed to provide material support for those fighting Nazi aggression. If that hadn't been enacted, what would the outcome have been in Europe?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I watched a BBC News story on this, it's sad that this new Trust is fouling things up with the Computer Museum. I don't see how you can have Bletchly Park without mentioning Colossus and early computing.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It seems the volunteer in question was taking people visiting Bletchley Park into the National Museum of Computing next door and acting as a tour guide there rather than working as a guide solely in Bletchley Park. He wasn't employed as a guide by the NMoC and I'm not even sure he or the tour groups he was escorting were paying entry fees to get into the museum; the two separate operations share the site and the buildings and there is no clear physical distinction between the two although the Bletchley Park team are supposedly planning to erect a fence soon).
WW 2 occurred some 70 years ago. Why get all hung up on national pride over something other people did decades ago?
many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore.
That's fine, but we all know what Bletchley Park ***BETA*** really needs is condos and a new car park, so crate up all that old iron and ship it off to China or somewhere for recycling.
not bitter, me. I just watched old wartime reels of the Packard plant in Detroit, and then saw a video of it today.
The horror...
"In response to user demands for improvement, Dice is proud to announce that it will partner with Disqus for comments on it's popular Slashdot tech news site."
Careful what you ask for, chief.
Are ads on the right 33% of the page? Is this what happens when Slashdot gets sold?
Well, the Iraqi invasion of Georgia, of course! Although to be truthful I think a lot of people would have welcomed it and been completely willing give it to them without a fight. I'd throw in Mississippi and Alabama if they'd take them, the rest of the country would be better off for it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You are speaking my language bro
At least I substantiated my opinion with a summary of key points an opponent would need to successfully address if he were (to my satisfaction, anyway) argue the opposite case. The original poster’s statement was an unsubstantiated bolt from the blue stated with almost religious fervour and conviction.
As for national pride: I’m a hybrid european, half british and half italian. I am certainly not in the habit of promoting the USA and it’s foreign policy. But merit must be given when merit is due: the USA saved our continental asses. And we must be forever grateful for that, whatever the motive might’ve been or might be said to have been.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
It was thanks to American manpower and equipment that the allies successfully opened a second front by invading Sicily in the summer of 1943 (and later a third front by invading Normandy in 1944), thus drawing away German forces that might’ve otherwise been directed towards the Eastern Front with possibly decisive effect. Stalingrad might’ve been a momentary (though expensive) setback for the German war effort if it weren’t for the fact that they never again had sufficient troops available to concentrate on the problem. And this, of course, is because of American intervention in the European war.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
those that forget history will oft repeat it. beta sucks, too
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.