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.
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.
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.
I'll just leave a documentary here that challenged for me the dominant view around world war 2 that I was indoctrinated with.
"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.
I mean Henry Ford was only not a Nazi in the sense that he wasn't a card carrying member of a foreign political organization. There were plenty of similar Nazi supporting executives in corporate America in the 1930s. And why wouldn't there be? It wasn't like fascism was a one time thing led by one person, it was all over Europe and spread to America, much like Communism in the other direction who similarly wanted to remake the world in their image.
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)
We have power centers around the globe. Power centers fill a certain void in societies, because nature hates the void.
Power centers try grow by influencing, coercing, manipulating, buying, bribing other power centers. Again, a law of nature: entities try to expand. Some fail at it, some don't fail - at first. Just like all other entities in nature.
The peasant in the street can profit from it or not. He can be killed by it or not.
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.
It doesn't seem like fringe conspiracy to me. If you want to tie it to WW2, Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. Reciprocally, Japan and Italy didn't have a problem with Hitler's attitudes either.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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).”
Can anyone recommend a more technical book on the design and operation of the Colossus? I've found Colossus, a collections of essays edited by B. Jack Copeland, but not much else, at least on Amazon. (Also interested in anything on Zuse's computers, as I've mostly studied the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and Eniac).
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.
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.
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.
Every time I read a story that indirectly highlights how advanced Germany because of the surreal effort needed to overcome them I realize if yet another year had been delayed in stopping Germany, they'd be running the world right now
actually if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor US may not have gotten involved at all or way way way too late
now we've evolved to use "AI" to perfectly target elementary schools without human oversight (or repercussions)
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...
TIL That's what xAI named their super compute cluster after, what an incredible tribute to such an incredible act of innovation. Let's hope the New Colossus lives up to its name sake.
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!
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_Beams
28 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 17.1 ms ] threadThe 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.
"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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
How far we have come :-p
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
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).”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7w6YXaNvt8
actually if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor US may not have gotten involved at all or way way way too late
now we've evolved to use "AI" to perfectly target elementary schools without human oversight (or repercussions)
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...
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!