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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."
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.
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
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
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?
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."
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 got Karma to burn. Make my day.
It's not like I need it much longer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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"
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.
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"