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- Hacker News
- Flowers had to begin building Colossus out of his own pocket. The British government eventually repaid him, but not in full.by RachelF
- The amount that humanity as a whole owes to individuals taking on personal risks for the greater good is innumerable.by fragmede
- FTA: The room-size machine weighed around a tonne.
I think “around a tonne” is very light for “room-size”, so I googled, and found https://www.tnmoc.org/news-releases/2019/2/5/colossus-decryp..., which says:
“Standing 2m high, 5 m wide and almost 4 m deep (7 ft by 17 ft by 11 ft), Colossus weighed five tonnes, and used 8 kW of power. Colossus Mark II, which arrived at Bletchley Park in May 1944, had 2,500 valves and 7 km of wiring, and was able to read 5000 characters per second (faster than anything ever produced commercially).”
by Someone - From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos.
How far we have come :-p
by CrzyLngPwd - Just what politicians need, lol.by crabbuh
- Should be made into a motion picture I think.
I remember being there and chatting to the engineer who was trying to keep the machine running. As I talked to him, Colossus crashed. It was apparently a full-time job maintaining all the mercury tubes at the correct temperature so that the memory continued to function properly...
by dm319 - An interesting point is that Colossus wasn't solving the same problem as the bombe. People usually group them together due to Bletchley Park, but they attacked different ciphers. It explains why Colossus ended up looking much more like an electronic programmable computer than bombe.by kiaansaraiya
- It was more of a special-purpose calculation machine than a general purpose computer, as we understand them which are based on von Neummann's architecture.by riazrizvi
- As it is said in TFA, it did not have the structure of a computer, but it was a very complex digital automaton and it contained the typical digital circuits that are used today, like counters and shift registers, which at that time were a novelty.
The first digital circuits with vacuum tubes and gas tubes had been designed also in UK, during the decade preceding WWII, when most of them had been used in nuclear physics, e.g. in electronic counters for ionizing radiation, because the mechanical counters commonly used at that time were too slow for counting radiation events.
The earlier publications about such electronic counters were the inspiration both in UK for Flowers and the other people who contributed to the design of Colossus, and also in USA for the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the first computer with vacuum tubes made in USA, whose electronic circuits were in turn an inspiration for the designers of ENIAC.
The first electronic computers were designed bottom-up, without much thinking about the high-level structure, until von Neumann handled that. The designers of those computers struggled mostly with the detailed schematic design of the digital blocks made with vacuum tubes, like flip-flops and gates, in order to make them work reliably, because before WWII there was very little experience with such circuits.
by adrian_b - It doesn’t resemble the computers of today, but none the less it was indeed a stored program digital computer. The first of its kind. The bombes were more akin to a special purpose calculation machine. Colossus was something a bit more special.by kiwijimm
- I’ve posted this before but if you’re in London and have a day to spare it’s very easy to get to Bletchley Park. Just take the train from Euston station. 1 hour ride worst case. Then it’s a five minute walk from the station. Well worth it.by andoma
- Go to the National Museum of Computing just next door and save a bomb and see the actual bombe! IMO the house is of minimal interest compared to the machines but costs a lot.by t43562
- Interesting how this technological war behind the scenes probably had a disproportionately large effect on the war compared to how little you hear about it in text books or history class growing up.
The mention Turing a little bit, but I really enjoyed the movie “The Imitation Game” about Turing building the “Bombe” machine and eventually breaking the Enigma code, and the effect that had on the war. Highly recommend!
by 40four - I despise Imitation Game. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on 'reality' of films and would prefer artistic license (while allowed) is limited but it got so many things wrong
Cdr. Denniston's family for example has said his portrayal is utterly wrong to the facts
by alex1138 - Because it's harder to grasp for average broader audience. And a topic about bunch of math geniuses is far less entertaining than a secret spy.
Also, that spy is action, mathematician is burried in office.
by shuwix - I read a book a few years ago about the battle of the beams, the use of radar navigation to guide bombers over their targets and attempts to jam the signals. I knew the basics of using radar to detect raids but a lot of this was new and eye opening for me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beamsby Podrod
- I wasn't sure if this was going to be about Colossus, Eniac, the Norden bombsight, or what. WW2 happened right at the birth of real computing so there are a few examples of computers that helped. Heck there was an air-dropped acoustic-homing torpedo that had what is essentially a small single-purpose analog computer to direct it.by rsamtravis
- The subhead, "Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications", makes that clear, and would be far less clickbaity.by dredmorbius
- I have a major problem with that article, it completely ignores Polish mathematicians' contributions who literally GAVE the brits the codes 5 weeks BEFORE the start of WWII.by kubatyszko
- This article is about Lorenz but you're thinking about Enigma, a completely different cipher used in a different way and by different parts of the German military in the same war and broken, as the article explains, using a Computer, not based on tricks learned from the Poles.
It's like you've seen an article about the Knicks winning a basketball game and you ask why it doesn't mention Igor Shesterkin - who plays ice hockey.
by tialaramex - i had the opportunity to visit bletchley about sixteen years ago... one interesting detail was that all the colossus machines were destroyed after the war as they were seen as too powerful and dangerous. it wasn't until years later that the retired telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time) who had built them began rebuilding them from memory as a sort of hobby/club centered at bletchley. there used to be a fellow there named tony sale who would tell you all about it, but unfortunately he passed away a few years ago.
super interesting place and worth the short trip out of london! also i believe the term they used was "semi-programmable digital computer." bombes were mechanical search machines that i believe operated on short ciphertext sequences and i believe the big innovation with the colossus was having the ciphertext live on a long optical tape that would be re-read at thousands of characters per second, thus enabling a high speed processing loop of longer sequences. but i am no expert on this!
by a-dub - > telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time)
Same in the US. It's why computers live in 19-inch racks.
by kps - The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossusby tetris11
- Tony Sale saved Bletchley Park. He was the instigator of the foundation and basically ran it single handed for a while. He believed deeply in it being preserved for the nation.
His main claim to fame before that was being Peter Wright’s right-hand man. Wright’s “Spycatcher”, talks of their joint exploits over the years. I got to ask Tony about it once, he was not too impressed Wright had done what he had done by writing that book.
by PaulRobinson - They weren't all destroyed, some were moved to what became GCHQ (UK's equivalent to the NSA)
See Influence and Fate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
It's Tommy Flowers I always felt sorry for, after the war he wanted a loan to build a computer was refused on the grounds that what he wanted to build was impossible. He knew it was possible but couldn't disclose that due to secrecy laws
by youngtaff - Appended is a walkaround video of the Colossus at the National Museum of Computing next to Bletchley Park which is, FYI, a much better and far more interesting place to visit than Bletchley Park itself on the same site - and much cheaper. They have a bombe that cracked enigma, the colossus and some other German encoding machines and they are incredible to see. The lectures were absolutely fascinating.by t43562
- I used to work there. I highly recommend the harwell dekatron or WITCH. It's another very old computer, 1950s. newer than colossus, but much easier to understand. It has decimal memory banks that light up, so you can literally see the memory, each of the registers, etc. If you go at the right time or ask a staff member very nicely you can see the debug mode where it can step instruction by instruction, and operation by operation through the machine code, and see the memory change at each step.
I also recommend if you have any mathematical chops asking staff about the process of cryptanalysis on enigma, and if you're really hardcore, lorenz. Its fascinating and if you get the right staff, they really have the knowledge to take you deep into how it was done. Yes many know about the exploit of using date/weather strings that appeared in a standard form, but exactly how that was used together with a huge amount of encrypted message data to reverse engineer the functioning of the machine they hadn't seen for lorenz is bonkers.
by RugnirViking