Colossus has been Rebuilt 279
Max Driver writes "In celebration of D-Day, "Colossus", one of the earliest electronic code-breaking machines, has been rebuilt after ten years of effort by computer conservationists. Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher. This story is being reported by the BBC. Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC."
Reminder: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wikipedia Article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reminder: (Score:5, Informative)
To elaborate:
GPUs still only run at a couple of hundred of MHz, but their dedicated circuitry allows them to perform certain matrix calculations much faster than x86 chips currently do, even with vector instruction extensions like MMX and SSE/SSE2.
Here are a couple of links to relevant articles. (1 [slashdot.org] 2 [slashdot.org])
Re:A tragedy (Score:5, Informative)
I saw a documentary on this a few weeks ago... Apparently, all the parts that went into making the beasties was "borrowed" from British Telecom. After the war, they just gave the parts back.
Re:A tragedy (Score:5, Informative)
The real real wikipedia article (no troll) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Support Bletchley Park (Score:3, Informative)
Really the First 'Computer'? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not really (Score:0, Informative)
And we still have some pretty fierce and innovative engineering companies, you might want to think about that next time you do anything on a computer whos CPU is based on an ARM core.
intersting book on colossus... (Score:4, Informative)
"From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park"
by Harvey Cragon
On amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I proofread an early copy of the book and it was quite interesting how the cryptanalysis was done and even more impressive what these people accomplished with technology that was, to quote Spock, not much removed from bearskins and stone knives.
maybe... (Score:3, Informative)
It would only be applicable for certain applications, but some of the things that a graphics card excels at (I think) are linear algebra, vector manipulation, and some other number-crunching activities.
You can't run linux on it though, just programs written in Brook Stream language (an extension of ANSI C).
but don't mention U-571 :-) (Score:3, Informative)
What about Babbage... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:but don't mention U-571 :-) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Support Bletchley Park (Score:1, Informative)
It's possible that they changed the result of the war.
The U-boat campaign, brilliantly directed by Admiral Doenitz, came close to knocking Britain out of the war, which would have ended the war in Europe. At the height of the U-boats' success, the food ration for a British citizen for a week could be held in one hand (that applied to someone in a non-essential job - manual workers got much more). Breaking the naval codes in May 1941 ensured that the U-boats would be defeated.
Re:Support Bletchley Park (Score:4, Informative)
The work on breaking Enigma started at the Polish Cipher Bureau with three Polish mathematicans Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki developing a mathematical model of its operation.
At Bletchley Park, there is plaque commemorating this contribution.
And the knowledge used was obtained by French intelligence, but only the Poles thought it possible to gain something out of it.
Googling for Poland Enigma will give you a lot of sources.
Or start here:
http://www.paiz.gov.pl/oldpai/newsletter/a
http://www.aw
http://wings.buffalo.edu/
Re:Are we "celebrating" D-Day now? (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you need a refresher on the meaning of 'celebrate' [webster.com] before making would-be sarcastic remarks:
"1 : to perform (a sacrament or solemn ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites"
"2 a : to honor (as a holiday) by solemn ceremonies"
Re:Wait! Wait! there's a pattern here (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Colossus of Rhodes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, the medium you are using now was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland. The underlying technology (that became ARPANet) was actually suggested by researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in England, built on Baran's (an American!) packet switching idea.
And any time you use PKI, remember that it was someone from Britain (GCHQ) who actually invented it, althuogh the UK government made him sit on it (see www.gchq.gov.uk)
But then of course, most of the interesting work in Science and Mathematics was done either by the British or by others working here like Dirac, Wittgenstein, Rutherford, Davy, Hooke and Newton inter alia.
This is not meant to sound like a flag-waving exercise for the UK, just to remind some of our less intelligent colonial friends that they did not, in fact, invent everything and bless the world with their very existence. I mean, you can't even find WMD in a country the size of Iraq...
Early computer and precomputer devices (Score:4, Informative)
Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.
Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC [upenn.edu], (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.
With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.
The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.
Re:Brit RSA encrytion (Score:4, Informative)
Then based on that model they discovered methods that were similar to RSA (Cocks, 1973) and Diffie-Hellman (Williamson, 1974).
Apparently, even though they knew how to encrypt, they didn't realize that it could also be used as a digital signature scheme.
The list of papers are:
Basic theory:
The possibility of secure non-secret digital encryption, J.H. Ellis 1970
RSA:
A note on "Non-secret encryption", C. C. Cocks 1973
Diffie-Hellman:
Non-secret encryption using a finite field, M. J. Williamson 1974
Thoughts on cheaper non-secret encryption, M.J. Williamson 1976
Historical:
The history of non-secret encryption, J.H. Ellis 199?
Those documents are in the gchq site, or somewhere near, but it is a PITA to search there (if you do, check both "non-secret" and "non secret", but I'd recommend google instead.
Re:but don't mention U-571 :-) (Score:1, Informative)