The computer that helped win World War II(spectrum.ieee.org) |
The computer that helped win World War II(spectrum.ieee.org) |
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!
If you consider the NMC "just up the road" then the Bletchley Park site you're thinking of is also "jump up the road" from er, Bletchley Park, a stately home that's less interesting to a nerd than either the NMC or Bletchley Park museum about war era "intelligence" but might be fascinating if period furniture is more interesting to you than the world's first (for many different values of first, the museum has several options, but not all of them) programmable computer.
although i just looked. critically they have different ticket offices. it was a long time ago! either way, worth a visit of both and they make up an excellent way to spend a day.
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
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.
The house is part of the museum these days, so a ticket for the museum covers the house (which is, yes, basically just one of a great many English stately homes you might visit and not by any means the most interesting) as well as numerous huts and exhibits about the larger intelligence operation in WW2 and what else was done on that site beyond simple "breaking Enigma" (the most famous thing) and Lorenz (which is why Colossus exists)
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).”
But this should be what you're looking for?
https://publish.fid-media.de/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c9...
Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.
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.
How far we have come :-p
And what nazi germany could have done back then, to not have it broken would have been very simple: not using prussian style of communication, meaning all the messages followed a certain pattern with certain keywords. Since the british knew those keywords and pattern, they had something of an angle to break it. (Parts of it are covered in the article)
Or of course use another layer of encryption (but that requires a simple redesign) which would have made the decryption not useful in a timely manner.
Better training for the operators would also have helped, e.g. don't start every message with "Heil Hitler". Some of the services were much better than the others IIRC.
The Luftwaffe were far more lax in their procedures, and Hermann Goring sent many trivial messages that made it easy for Bletchley Park to decrypt.[1] From early 1940 to the end of the war, air force messages were routinely read.
[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma: "Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring was known to use it for trivial communications, including informing squadron commanders to make sure the pilots he was going to decorate had been properly deloused."
"Everything is a rich man's trick"
For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc and knows what about this or anything else of I mean? I really want to have this intellectual, rational conversation about what it could mean if even 1% of the claims made in that video are true. For me, it could point to why reality and selective enforcement of law feels so prevalent, weird and heavy, and unequal justice is so common today.
Enigma is among the last of an obsolete YOLO approach to encrypting written text. On the other hand Lorenz, like the systems Britain and her allies were also using, is a stream cipher, not ultimately so different from say ChaCha20 except that Lorenz is broken and ChaCha20 is not. Lorenz uses streams of 5-bit codes whereas today we'd think in 8-bit bytes, but fundamentally it's the same idea.
Attacking this needed a much more sophisticated machine, enter Colossus, a physical realisation of the idea that Computation can be performed by a machine.
Takeway: try to recognize a potentially not profitable grinding operation by power centers. Try not to become a bag hodler :) Ultimately humans can say NO, no matter the power of the manipulation and coercion by power centers.
Fascists were temporarily embarrassed by Hitlers loss in Europe. But they're more or less back in power in America with the people behind trump that runs the show, the heritage foundation. As with Hitler they've joined forces with the billionaires.
It would be a mistake to associate either just with wealth and tax brackets.
Those kinds of documentaries muddle the water by being too conspiratorial and not building an idea of things that actually happened in context instead they're just raising the spectre of one cabal or another. They just make you afraid and say whacko things which is counterproductive to actually recognizing and forming actual resistance to real threats like present day reality show themed fascism by insecure idiots in power. (it was a much scarier time when the fascists were competent)
I doubt that if you took the smartest people today and equipped them with the knowledge and resources around at the time - and no more than that, so no modern insights or historical knowledge - they'd be able to do what Turing, Flowers, and the others did.
Reverse engineering and breaking an encryption protocol by hand and then mechanising it with just math and valve technology was an astounding achievement.
I don't know how you'd go further in terms of "what it means" in any deeper sense. Trump praises Netanyahu and Putin. It's all just there on the surface. It's just the world we live in.
Hitler himself was not blond or blue eyed. So .. inferiority complex is a dangerous thing.
As for everything was a conspiracy .. I advise to read a bit more about that time. The german rich elite also thought they could control hitler and use him against the communists.
The world was arguably also less complex back then, so there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to snatch in terms of information theory
Don't let the Hideo Kojima's of the world fool you into believing they did everything themselves. It's an effort of many, many who do it for the love of the craft and are content to receive no praise for it
You can usually make the argument that any particular scientific or engineering revolution would have happened anyway with different people nor more than 25 years or so later, at least any advancement since the mid 19th century.
Sure but the rhetoric of hate and disastrously racist things were happening well before the war took place and soon after the party took power. It wasn't some mystery that these were terrible people, the extent of awareness of what they were capable of just got gradually worse. In an age of bigotry they were still extreme but not THAT extreme if that makes sense so some people were overlooking their words and actions in order to praise the return to prosperity. But anybody with good sense and a decent disposition knew very early on that these were bad people and not a desirable change.
Don't ask me how I know...