Second World War Code-cracking Computing Hero Colossus Turns 70 110
DW100 writes "The Colossus computer that helped the Allies crack messages sent by the Nazis during the Second World War has celebrated its 70th birthday. The machine was a pioneering feat of engineering, able to read 5,000 characters a second to help the team at Bletchley Park crack the German's Lorenz code in rapid time. This helped the Allies gather vital information on the Nazi's plans, and is credited with helping end the war effort early, saving millions of lives."
MOVIN’ ON UP. (Score:1, Insightful)
More like movin' on out to Reddit and Ars if they follow through with the threat to force us onto Beta.
Fuck Beta.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:MOVIN' ON UP. (Score:2)
Edit: Oh, and the lack of auto-fill for the subject of new comments. Almost forgot about that one.
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Maybe I'm loosing my nerdiness...
You're unleashing your nerdiness? Watch out, world!
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Go sit over there with management and marketing, this here is the tech department.
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Moral of the story: Dice, if you want folks to like
Back on topic . . . first post!
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Regardless of whether or not the complaints have merit, clicking on a story to read the commentary only to see a sea of people frothing at the mouth over what will eventually be inconsequential stuff. Yes, inconsequential. I've been through several of these Slashdot revamps now, and it's always the same story: new layout in
Re:MOVIN’ ON UP. (Score:5, Insightful)
I got Karma to burn. Make my day.
It's not like I need it much longer.
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That's like saying "I don't mind the crime in my neighborhood. If only just everyone else could complain less about it all would be fine."
Ergo, Fuck Beta.
Amen (Score:1)
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I think it's the "snazzyness". It sure uses a lot more modern and edgy technology. Funny enough, it seems that a lot of techs don't seem to like using edgy technology.
And, well, maybe I'm getting old or something, but I have to admit I get the same feeling. Slashdot beta just doesn't sit right with me. Some would say it scrolls smoother, I can only say it feels more sluggish when scrolling. Some would consider the "loading a page when displaying it" beneficial for bandwidth, I just consider it a waste of my
In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
the slashdot beta sucks
It's a replica. (Score:5, Insightful)
The machine at Bletchley Park is a working replica, not the original.
There would have been no victory without the resou (Score:5, Informative)
That’s a totally dubious opinion misstated as fact.
Without American materiel (lend/lease ships, tanks, bomber aircraft) and manpower (D-Day landings, continental fighting, naval convoys) the war effort would have been almost inevitably lost. This does not mean that the UK mightn’t have eked out a long-term stalemate and perhaps even an uneasy truce, but the defeat of Nazi Germany would have been out of the question. What ultimately defeated Germany was not the war on two fronts, but an expensive, resource-intensive war on two fronts that exceeded the country’s ability to regenerate. Without the virtually bottomless reserves of resources provided by the USA, the USSR would have been eventually brought to heel, and the West would have followed suit.
The USA was pivotal.
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That’s a totally dubious opinion misstated as fact.
Without American materiel (lend/lease ships, tanks, bomber aircraft) and manpower (D-Day landings, continental fighting, naval convoys) the war effort would have been almost inevitably lost.
Didn't the Americans manage to sink all the tanks we loaned them on D-Day by launching them too far out at sea? My history book says the British were the only ones who managed to get them ashore (along with the materials to build a prefabricated port so they could dock ships there and get the heavy gear on land).
I also thought the beginning of the end of the war was down to the Russians in Stalingrad. The capture of Berlin was termed a 'race' between the Allies and the Russians (because they both wanted to
The turning point of Stalingrad (Score:2)
It was thanks to American manpower and equipment that the allies successfully opened a second front by invading Sicily in the summer of 1943 (and later a third front by invading Normandy in 1944), thus drawing away German forces that might’ve otherwise been directed towards the Eastern Front with possibly decisive effect. Stalingrad might’ve been a momentary (though expensive) setback for the German war effort if it weren’t for the fact that they never again had sufficient troops available
Re: dubious opinion misstated as fact (Score:2)
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Re:the millions of lives (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't blame the British, they kept fighting.
The French on the other hand surrendered.
BTW I haven't gone to the Beta site, but it sounds like shit. Has anyone asked Obama? "If you like your Slashdot classic you can keep it"
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Why did the US need to get involved? From http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/inde... [byu.edu]
"My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour.
I believe it is peace for our time...
Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."
Singling out the US demonstrates a lack of understanding of the historical context.
Re:the millions of lives (Score:4, Insightful)
I love ACs who make these inflammatory statements without any knowledge on the subject. The German war machine was allowed to grow because of the complacence of its neighbors. Throughout the Nazi regime before there was any aggression there were treaty violations that none of Germany's neighbors did anything about. Was it up to the US to deal with that? If you have a guy building a war machine in the house next door the time to stop it is when you first see it, not let him build it to see how good it looks in final paint. There was also ample time for the European leaders to see just how effective the German war machine was in the Spanish Civil War, did anybody not see the German Air and Armored divisions not go into Spain in 1936 to support Franco? It was all training folks for Germany, live fire no doubt, but still training and when Germany was finally ready there wasn't much that could stop them except a little strip of ocean. That was also 4 years before the invasion of Poland. When war finally did break out the US did lend its support, in March 1941 the Lend Lease act was passed to provide material support for those fighting Nazi aggression. If that hadn't been enacted, what would the outcome have been in Europe?
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Pre-empting what, exactly?
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Well, the Iraqi invasion of Georgia, of course! Although to be truthful I think a lot of people would have welcomed it and been completely willing give it to them without a fight. I'd throw in Mississippi and Alabama if they'd take them, the rest of the country would be better off for it.
Re:It's a replica. (Score:5, Insightful)
The machine at Bletchley Park is a working replica, not the original.
Yes, but it's a lovingly crafted completely functional working system that preserves both the spirit and the full capabilities of the original, and the project team has worked very hard to avoid unnecessary deviations from its (highly successful) 20th Century specification. Pretty much the opposite, then, of Slashdot Beta.
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> Yes, but it's a lovingly crafted completely functional working system that preserves
> both the spirit...
LOL!
"It's based on a true story. It didn't actually happen like this, and the car chases and explosions were added to keep people's interest up during the character development, but essentially it's more or less exactly what happened to Van Gogh".
I agree with you, however, about Slashdot Beta. It's still as sucky as it looked however many months ago they first revealed it. It feels like somethi
Re:It's a replica. Now under attack (Score:2)
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I watched a BBC News story on this, it's sad that this new Trust is fouling things up with the Computer Museum. I don't see how you can have Bletchly Park without mentioning Colossus and early computing.
If it aint broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
The Nazis would've won if the Allies used Colossus Beta.
Beta Sucks Hilter's Balls.
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That would be ball, not balls
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Nah Hitler's singular plum was British propaganda; Chairman Mao on the other hand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Dice just killed Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Dice just killed Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Any application developer worth anything knows about Model-View-Controller [wikipedia.org] and can separate the underlying data model interaction protocols from the view presented to the user.
There is no excuse whatsoever for the loss of any existing features that are found in classic, nor is there any technical reason whatsoever why there has to be a migration to a single "new" site to keep up with the times. The slashdot website is just a view into the comment and stories database, and there should be many views for everybody to choose their preferred one at any time, including the "beta" one as just one of them. In fact, if slashdot published a reasonable API there would be plenty of low digit users who could whip up a sane interface before breakfast.
What is tablet/phone friendly? (Score:1)
One thing that I don't get is how the current wave of web site redesigns are actually, in any way, tablet/smart phone friendly.
On a device with a small display concise and space eficient presentation of information, without excess white space or eye candy, is necessary if you don's want to end up feeling like you are peering at the site through a soda straw. Using large fonts, wide line spacing, and lots of white space just makes a small display effectively smaller.
On a device with a low bandwidth or expens
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If you don't get what his referencing in his post, I'd say you're probably the one who doesn't belong here.
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Not a computer (Score:2)
Only, it wasn't a computer in the modern parlance of being general purpose, programmable, and Turling-complete. It was more like an advanced calculator, that only worked for a single job.
Also, Beta sucks.
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No. Colossus was programmable but it wasn't Turing complete.
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Except it was. You know, given that Alan Turing kind of designed the thing.
No he didn't, it was designed by Tommy Flowers [wikipedia.org].
Colossus wasn't Turing complete either.
Cryptonomicon (Score:2)
That's just freaky, I just finished re-reading "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson last night and this story pops up.
Probability (Score:2)
All your coincidence does is give us a reliable means of estimating how many people out there are reading Cryptonomicon at any given moment in time. It’s not freaky at all. It’s just the consequence of the vast number of humans currently alive.
And if you need any more proof of why Russia's ant (Score:2)
Just look at what the Brit's old-school equivalents led to in how they treated him after he played a critical role in helping the Allies win WW2.
Sorry if this seems off-topic, but this is Alan Turing I'm talking about here, and the two most salient pieces of his life were his maths and his ability to both dream beyond his peers, and his ability to make it absolutely practical where needed, and his sexual orientation. This ability with maths is rare to see, and how the British establishment saw fit to overl
Re: And if you need any more proof of why Russia's (Score:1)
the two most salient pieces of his life were his maths and his ability to both dream beyond his peers, and his ability to make it absolutely practical where needed, and his sexual orientation.
...with arithmetic skills like yours, it's probably a good thing you have a mathematician as a hero.
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Go easy on him, he probably has a fanatical devotion to the Pope.
I'll come in again.
A true precursor (Score:5, Funny)
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook.
Bomba kryptologiczna (Score:5, Informative)
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook.
Alan Turing was a indeed a colossus but he didn't crack the enigma code. He didn't even lay a lot of of the ground work for designing this machine, it was a team of mathematicians working for Polish military intelligence after Polish and French spooks had gained access various data concerning Enigma that included inspecting a working copy of an enigma machine. Their names were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki and Henryk Zygalski and they reverse engineered the Enigma based on this material using mathematics and created what they called the 'bomba kryptologiczna'. The famous Colossus was a 'substantial develpment' from this device. What Alan Turing and Co. did was crack the improved enigma machines (still a daunting task) who had been upgraded in 1938-39, but he and and his team stood on the shoulders of those three polish mathematicians. The British are very keen to take sole credit for cracking Enigma but they got a whole helluva lot of help from Poland and France and as a German I'd like it to be crystal clear to the world who exactly it was that kicked our cryptographic ass :-)
Re:Bomba kryptologiczna (Score:4, Informative)
And there is the fact that US didn't capture a German Navy Enigma from a submarine as portrayed by Hollywood.
Sure the Brits owe a lot to the Polish who nicked an enigma but as has been said the advanced machine was a really different beast to crack. Also the German Navy changed their codes at a critical time of the war. Without the people at BP a lot more lives would have been lost, a great number of them US troops on their way to Europe.
My Mother worked there for two years (1943-45). She never said anything about her work until the late 1970's so naturally I won't hear anything said against the people who did that almost impossible job.
It's been a while since I read about this so I may be shaky on details but I don't think the Poles nicked an Enigma but they did buy one. There were several variants of Enigma divided into two different classes, the commercial and the military units. You could buy a commercial grade unit quite without restrictions so the Poles did that just to get an idea of how it worked. Later on they bribed a Nazi customs official to get access to a military Enigma and inspect it because stealing it would have alerted the Nazis that the Enigma system had been compromised. The French also contributed data and that led to the construction of the 'Bomba'. When the Germans added more rotors to the Enigma in 1938 it massively increased the magnitude of the required decryption effort and the Poles didn't have the resources to construct the requisite machinery. That's where the British became involved.
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"The British are very keen to take sole credit for cracking Enigma"
Well, we're not, actually. Any more than we're keen to take the sole credit for winning the Second World War.
It was a team effort.
Re:Bomba kryptologiczna (Score:5, Informative)
Correct. (Score:5, Informative)
The Colossus was useless at decrypting Enigma traffic: that was handled by the electronic bombes.
Colossus was constructed to break Lorenz/Tunny traffic: a much more advanced system designed for encrypting teleprinter five-bit Baudot-code teleprinter transmissions. Dilettantes will harp on Tunny’s greater number of rotors, but it was a far more radical departure than might at first appear. As many subsequent stream-ciphers, Tunny XORed cleartext to a cryptostream. Amongst other things, that meant that there was no restriction against a character in the ciphertext being the same as the corresponding character in the cleartext, a flaw which allowed skilled cryptographers to infer what might, conceivably, be contained within a given stretch of text.
Two sets of ‘wheels’ were summed independently to a five-bit cleartext word. One set was advanced on every word and one advanced only if another wheel’s value was !FALSE (this wheel itself advanced on every word). This meant, amongst other things, that sometimes part of the keystream did not increment, and this in turn had a discernible effect upon the statistical distribution of the difference between successive ciphertext words.
Reconstructing the keystream from these distributions is how Tunny was broken, and that is the task that Colossus was designed to automate. (Mumbling about Colossus’ Turing-Completeness is fundamentally ill-posed, as no machine has the infinite memory capacity envisioned by Turing. I will however emphasise that Colossus lacked a stored program facility, a concept that was only developed much later.)
correction (Score:2)
I meant electromechanical bombes.
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Wikipedia says Konrad Zuse's "... greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse [wikipedia.org]).
Zuse's Z3 and his earlier Z1 stored program machines predate the 1944 Colossus.
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Actually, Turing designed an improved "bombe" -- the "Turing Bombe" -- and there are reproductions of those at Bletchley Park, as well as the Colossus.
Note that Colossus was not built to crack Enigma. It was built to crack teleprinter code. The "Lorenz Cipher" -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Apostrophe Hell (Score:2)
Nazis' not Nazi's
FFS
Kill Beta (Score:1)
Fuck The Beta (Score:2)
Fuck The Beta
An amazing piece of engineering...also FUCK BETA (Score:4, Interesting)
This may look a little contrived, but the new management team at Bletchley Park also seem to wish to "improve" things by making them worse.
For example, they recently sacked a long-time volunteer guide because he insisted on showing guests the nearby National Museum of Computing, (which is where the Colossus is replica is actually housed).
http://www.independent.co.uk/n... [independent.co.uk]
Oh, and double fuck beta....been here for decades, and whilst I'm all for progress the classic site never struck me as broken, (apart from special character support - is that fixed in "beta"? )
The last I heard progress meant IMPROVEMENT. Listening DICE?
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It seems the volunteer in question was taking people visiting Bletchley Park into the National Museum of Computing next door and acting as a tour guide there rather than working as a guide solely in Bletchley Park. He wasn't employed as a guide by the NMoC and I'm not even sure he or the tour groups he was escorting were paying entry fees to get into the museum; the two separate operations share the site and the buildings and there is no clear physical distinction between the two although the Bletchley Park
Credit at last (Score:2)
Haven't seen the Beta so can't comment.
The Forbin Project? (Score:2)
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At least I substantiated my opinion. (Score:2)
At least I substantiated my opinion with a summary of key points an opponent would need to successfully address if he were (to my satisfaction, anyway) argue the opposite case. The original poster’s statement was an unsubstantiated bolt from the blue stated with almost religious fervour and conviction.
As for national pride: I’m a hybrid european, half british and half italian. I am certainly not in the habit of promoting the USA and it’s foreign policy. But merit must be given when merit i
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