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 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.
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.
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!
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.
I don't think I would describe the NMC as "just up the road". It's the same physical site.
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.
the nmc is most interesting, but also pretty cool to see turing's office in hut 8 (i guess the portable classroom like structure for a computer lab is a trope that goes all the way back to the beginning)!
that's what i was describing! :) it's on the bletchley site (they share a parking lot) and was where tony sale and friends rebuilt the colossus.
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.
It's on the same site but there is some institutional nonsense that means getting onto the Bletchley site doesn't guarantee access to the NMoC, which is only open on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Bletchley Park museum is basically everything else on that site except the NMC. If you're interested in Computing then yeah the NMC is the only part worth visiting, but if you're interested in intelligence, code breaking etc. or in what life was actually like during WW2 then the museum is pretty interesting.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘Stored program’ is where the debate is. Colossus was ‘programmable’ but the program was not a series of instructions executed in a sequence - it was a single data process executed on the input data against a set of stored registers.
Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.
That was the data. Point of Collosus was to analyze ciphertexts; the text goes on the loop. It’s looped so your program can run over the data multiple times, since it’s sequential access only.
It was the first programmable electronic digital computing machine, yes. Special-purpose computing machines had been around since the 1600's (where they were used as textile weaving machines I think).
And the “electronic” part is important. The Z3 predates in by 2 years and was a programmable digital computer, except it used electromechanical relays.
The Z3 is arguably more programmable than colossus and it was proven to be Turing complete in its stock configuration. Though the Z3 lacked the ability to conditionally branch, so nobody realised it at the time.
“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).
the bletchley park trust sells (used to?) pamphlets in the gift shop that they call "reports" which have been written by some of the rebuild team and other associates.
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 Japanese did not place much time or emphasis on encryption. So, if by help you mean "vacuumed up" all the stuff that was out in the open that was easy to crack, then yes.
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)
Sure, just copy the contemporary American SIGABA machine, or the cold-war ear Russian Fialka machine. The first public-domain solution for SIGABA was published only in 2023, and I believe Fialka is still unsolved (at least publicly).
A few things that help make these secure:
1. More rotors. SIGABA has 5 cipher rotors, while Fialka has 10.
2. Irregular stepping, instead of odometer-style stepping.
Had they not used a reflector pin in the encryption (simplified encrypting/decrypting a message using the same rotor configuration) it would have been far harder to crack, because the pin ensured that no letter could ever encode itself and that greatly reduced the search space
Also today there is no foolproof encryption if you make misstakes (or if an unknow attacker knows more about math than you do, or made a working quantum computer)
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.
Iirc, veritasium video said it was the weather report at the beginning of the message that fueled quicker decryption. So, not following same letter format each time might have helped.
The fact that the Enigma never encoded a letter as itself was a significant flaw in the design, which could presumably have been avoided.
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 Kriegsmarine had more secure procedures for transmitting the setting key, added more rotors for more possible combinations, and eventually introduced a new Engima with four rotors instead of three. Their transmissions were more difficult to decrypt.
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."
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.
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.
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)
It was a much scarier time because far more people were far more 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.
Hogwash. Humans are masters of innovation, and are highly motivated to solve problems. None of these men worked from the ground up, but built on the groundwork laid down by others (Turing especially).
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
They were scientific revolutions ripe for the right people at the right time. These people are uncommon but they're always around, there was nothing particularly special about that generation or those few that found themselves where they did. If the events of the world wars didn't collapse civilization to the degree of the late bronze age collapse, the fall of the western roman empire, the Maya collapse, etc. then computing machinery was pretty inevitable in the span of a few decades.
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.
You need steam power, chemical batteries, basic metallurgy, and the telegraph to make global communications networks obvious.
With constant conquest and expansion Rome was full of slaves which distorted the market need for mechanical power.
Hero of Alexandria made a little steam powered spinning toy which could have been the inspiration for steam power and the industrial revolution but it wasn't and the western empire was already on the path to decline. When the expansion hit its practical limit Rome fell apart instead of industrializing under the effects of Christianity and a series of decadent or just bad emperors.
Rome made ENORMOUS strides in the advancement of civilization when it came to organization and institutions it just didn't hit the industrialization spark and stopped advancing.
It's important to remember that Nazi Germany was not seen as an enemy at first, and many people admired how Hitler had supposedly lifted Germany out of the economic catastrophe of Weimar. Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. It was not an uncommon sentiment that democracy was weak and the Nazis showed us a better way. This sentiment was extremely wrong-headed, but it wasn't a matter of outright sympathizing with the enemy.
>Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war.
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.
My point isn't to defend the Nazi sympathies of Ford et al, but merely that funding and trading with Nazi Germany happened before the war, and doesn't mean that it's some cabal getting rich while the rest of us fight.
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.
" Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. "
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.
Colossus isn't for Enigma, it's to attack Lorenz aka "Tunny".
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7w6YXaNvt8
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.
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.
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!
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.
> telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time)
Same in the US. It's why computers live in 19-inch racks.
The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus
I don't think I would describe the NMC as "just up the road". It's the same physical site.
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.
the nmc is most interesting, but also pretty cool to see turing's office in hut 8 (i guess the portable classroom like structure for a computer lab is a trope that goes all the way back to the beginning)!
that's what i was describing! :) it's on the bletchley site (they share a parking lot) and was where tony sale and friends rebuilt the colossus.
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.
It's on the same site but there is some institutional nonsense that means getting onto the Bletchley site doesn't guarantee access to the NMoC, which is only open on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
Don't ask me how I know...
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
that's where they computed numberwang, right?
It was a huge advancement. Previously they were computing numberwang on slide rules.
That's wangernumb!
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
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.
The fact that Lorenz was broken was kept secret for the longest time. Lots of people don't know about it!
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.
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.
The Bletchley Park museum is basically everything else on that site except the NMC. If you're interested in Computing then yeah the NMC is the only part worth visiting, but if you're interested in intelligence, code breaking etc. or in what life was actually like during WW2 then the museum is pretty interesting.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘Stored program’ is where the debate is. Colossus was ‘programmable’ but the program was not a series of instructions executed in a sequence - it was a single data process executed on the input data against a set of stored registers.
Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.
Having seen the replica, I noticed it has a long continuous tape loop. Was the program "stored" in the paper tape?
That was the data. Point of Collosus was to analyze ciphertexts; the text goes on the loop. It’s looped so your program can run over the data multiple times, since it’s sequential access only.
It was the first programmable electronic digital computing machine, yes. Special-purpose computing machines had been around since the 1600's (where they were used as textile weaving machines I think).
And the “electronic” part is important. The Z3 predates in by 2 years and was a programmable digital computer, except it used electromechanical relays.
The Z3 is arguably more programmable than colossus and it was proven to be Turing complete in its stock configuration. Though the Z3 lacked the ability to conditionally branch, so nobody realised it at the time.
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).”
Flowers had to begin building Colossus out of his own pocket. The British government eventually repaid him, but not in full.
The amount that humanity as a whole owes to individuals taking on personal risks for the greater good is innumerable.
From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos.
How far we have come :-p
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).
How about this one, although it covers the context of the times…. https://www.amazon.ca/Colossus-Bletchley-Parks-Greatest-Secr...
the bletchley park trust sells (used to?) pamphlets in the gift shop that they call "reports" which have been written by some of the rebuild team and other associates.
I think the national library (whatever it is called) has the actual operation manual available.
But this should be what you're looking for?
https://publish.fid-media.de/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c9...
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...
The British also helped with the US Navy attack on Japanese ciphers, didn't they?
The Japanese did not place much time or emphasis on encryption. So, if by help you mean "vacuumed up" all the stuff that was out in the open that was easy to crack, then yes.
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)
Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?
Sure, just copy the contemporary American SIGABA machine, or the cold-war ear Russian Fialka machine. The first public-domain solution for SIGABA was published only in 2023, and I believe Fialka is still unsolved (at least publicly).
A few things that help make these secure:
1. More rotors. SIGABA has 5 cipher rotors, while Fialka has 10.
2. Irregular stepping, instead of odometer-style stepping.
3. A letter can encrypt to itself.
4. Better operational protocols.
Had they not used a reflector pin in the encryption (simplified encrypting/decrypting a message using the same rotor configuration) it would have been far harder to crack, because the pin ensured that no letter could ever encode itself and that greatly reduced the search space
Also today there is no foolproof encryption if you make misstakes (or if an unknow attacker knows more about math than you do, or made a working quantum computer)
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.
Iirc, veritasium video said it was the weather report at the beginning of the message that fueled quicker decryption. So, not following same letter format each time might have helped.
The fact that the Enigma never encoded a letter as itself was a significant flaw in the design, which could presumably have been avoided.
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 Kriegsmarine had more secure procedures for transmitting the setting key, added more rotors for more possible combinations, and eventually introduced a new Engima with four rotors instead of three. Their transmissions were more difficult to decrypt.
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."
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.
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.
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)
It was a much scarier time because far more people were far more 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.
Hogwash. Humans are masters of innovation, and are highly motivated to solve problems. None of these men worked from the ground up, but built on the groundwork laid down by others (Turing especially).
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
These people still exist, there just isn't the same institutional push to promote them to prominence so you don't know about them.
Their adversaries had the same knowledge and resources: gears, relays, vacuum tubes. It was a fairly level playing field.
They were scientific revolutions ripe for the right people at the right time. These people are uncommon but they're always around, there was nothing particularly special about that generation or those few that found themselves where they did. If the events of the world wars didn't collapse civilization to the degree of the late bronze age collapse, the fall of the western roman empire, the Maya collapse, etc. then computing machinery was pretty inevitable in the span of a few decades.
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.
Except, why didn't the ancient Romans or Egyptians invent the Internet? They had enough civilization to build empires.
There's a tech tree, more or less.
You need steam power, chemical batteries, basic metallurgy, and the telegraph to make global communications networks obvious.
With constant conquest and expansion Rome was full of slaves which distorted the market need for mechanical power.
Hero of Alexandria made a little steam powered spinning toy which could have been the inspiration for steam power and the industrial revolution but it wasn't and the western empire was already on the path to decline. When the expansion hit its practical limit Rome fell apart instead of industrializing under the effects of Christianity and a series of decadent or just bad emperors.
Rome made ENORMOUS strides in the advancement of civilization when it came to organization and institutions it just didn't hit the industrialization spark and stopped advancing.
It's important to remember that Nazi Germany was not seen as an enemy at first, and many people admired how Hitler had supposedly lifted Germany out of the economic catastrophe of Weimar. Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. It was not an uncommon sentiment that democracy was weak and the Nazis showed us a better way. This sentiment was extremely wrong-headed, but it wasn't a matter of outright sympathizing with the enemy.
>Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war.
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.
My point isn't to defend the Nazi sympathies of Ford et al, but merely that funding and trading with Nazi Germany happened before the war, and doesn't mean that it's some cabal getting rich while the rest of us fight.
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.
" Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. "
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 British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.
Colossus isn't for Enigma, it's to attack Lorenz aka "Tunny".
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.