The computer that helped win World War II

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 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!

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

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.

Flowers had to begin building Colossus out of his own pocket. The British government eventually repaid him, but not in full.

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.

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).”

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).

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.

From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos.

How far we have come :-p

The British also helped with the US Navy attack on Japanese ciphers, didn't they?

Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?

[flagged]

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.

The British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.