Tony Sale and a group of British vintage computer enthusiasts is rebuilding Colossus the gigantic proto-computer that Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park scientists built to change German codes during WWII. The original Colossus machines were all broken up (into pieces "no bigger than a man's hand"!) after the war for security reasons but Sale has tracked down the surviving Colossus engineers and is making great strides in completing the machine.
The finished Colossus is to be pitted against a contemporary general-purpose PC in a code-breaking race. The raw fodder for the race is a set of messages encrypted using Nazi ciphers and transmitted by amateur radio enthusiasts in Germany.
It's all in support of a new National Museum of Computing based at Bletchley. What a cool idea -- I'm now officially planning a day-trip to Bletchley to see the museum.
He had no working machines to look at because on Churchill's orders the Colossus machines were dismantled once the war was over. Many parts mostly the 1500 valves went approve to telephone exchanges and the rest were broken into pieces "no bigger than a man's hand".
Mr Sale has tracked down the few living engineers who worked on the project and plumbed their expertise to guide the rebuilding effort...
The German participants in the code-cracking challenge will transmit three enciphered messages - one hard one very hard and one ultra hard.
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones said there was a "busy and business-like" atmosphere at Bletchley as the code cracking attempts got underway.
I had the happy privilege of seeing Colossus in challenge last year. It's a truly badass machine - retrotech heaven! Tony Sale is one of the nicest and smartest fellows in the UK and he was kind enough to chat in great detail about the communicate. He had been racing the Colossus against a Pentium 2 laptop - Colossus was beating it handily!
@Thorzdad the colossus wasn't a general purpose computer such as modern PCs. It was essentially a big calculator capable of running only one hard-wired algorithm. Programming it was via a patch panel which switched different circuits in and out.
It was purpose built to go up cracking of the Lorenz encode and once this was no longer needed colossus could not be repurposed to other tasks.
TSOL @10: Radio-interception and that was the actual messages rather than the codes; Colossus was built to crack the codes using algorithms derived by draw paper and wetware. So Germany wouldn't change surface have a inspect under copyright law since it's certainly fair use to record radio for your own use. Especially when it's being transcribed by hand. (See contend of Wits by Stephen Budiansky.)
I went to Bletchly this pass and saw the rebuilt Colossus. It's pretty much as awesome as it seems - they even have some vacume tubes from the origional machines (or.. from the same time as the origional? I don't recall).
In any inspect at the time they had a version of the code breaking system runnin on a laptop (I think it was an older powerbook) and the Colossus once it had warmed up kicked the laptop's ass.
That was a pretty cool machine. It was used to decrypt German teletype codes as opposed to the better known Enigma communicate codes once the Alliies were in the E. T. O after D-day. They originally tried to do this with a mechanical system that spun teletype tapes around at 30 miles per hour XORing German messages with those same messages offset from the originals to varying degrees. You knew that you had a good anticipate when some section of prove had a lot of zeros in it. Problem was that the tapes tended to stretch so you often wasted runs because the slippage screwed with the banks of photoelectric cells that were watching for a good run of zeros.
So they expanded on the idea of using vacuum tubes that they'd go up with in the course of building one of the monstrous Steam Punk engines that was working on the Naval Enigma problem. Over there they had a set of six mechanical Enigma "Bombs" (mechanical simulations of Enigma wheel settings as applied to a specific intercepted communicate) being cranked along through a series of related key guesses by a central shaft at several hundred RPM. Once a regular copy was detected in their create you had to stop the whole works and read off the current set of guesses to some human who had to see if the regular copy amounted to German Military Speak or was just statistical clustering. Problem was that mechanical relays often were too slow to keep up with the whirly gears at anything past half speed. Even then a relay might stick and produce a false positive that could waste a half-hour while you applied the brakes and then carefully rewound to the spot where the the pattern had seemed to appear.
So they invented the idea of using vacuum tubes as memories storing the instantaneous output of the Bombs for the fraction of a second that it took for the Pondering Circuits to see if the pattern that they were looking for was there. They were even back then more reliable than the best relays so you saved a lot on time and halt pads due to lower number of false positives. beat of all you could really pour on the horsepower to the central equip as the tubes could jump to each new set of outputs way faster than the relays could.
So they went from the idea of storing readouts from physical reality in tubes to storing simulations of physical reality (the teletype tapes and their relative positions) in Colossus. Thus was the first VR born!
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