Colossus: The Secret Computer That Helped Win World War II
The Computer That Helped Win World War II
I explore how Tommy Flowers built Colossus, the world's first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer, to crack Germany's advanced Tunny encryption. While Alan Turing developed the initial mathematical methods, Colossus was essential for breaking high-speed teletype codes used by Hitler's command. This machine, now recognized as an IEEE Milestone, allowed the Allies to intercept critical military communications, fundamentally altering the course of the war.
Tunny messages, often signed by Adolph Hitler himself, turned out to be pure gold for the Allies.
- kubatyszko
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.
- a-dub
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!
- Someone
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).”
- pfdietz
The British also helped with the US Navy attack on Japanese ciphers, didn't they?
- riazrizvi
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.