Colossus

[den]

Colossus Mk2, a wartime code-breaker hailed as one of the first electronic computers, has been rebuilt and reunited with Bletchley Park veterans.!

Comments

Neo said it best when he said Woah!

[ngarewyrd.livejournal.com]

By current computing standards it was fast, according to Mr Sale.

He argues that the original Colossus was so powerful, it would take current computers the same amount of time to break codes.

Damn me, that's impressive indeed.. Obviously he's talking about home desktop systems, I doubt VERY much that Colossus was so powerful that it could operate at the same speeds as some of the supercomputers around today. But even so..

Daayam!

Re: Neo said it best when he said Woah!

[elektron.livejournal.com]

Doubtful, considering the ENIAC was slower than a modern scientific calculator.

Re: Neo said it best when he said Woah!

[ngarewyrd.livejournal.com]

ENIAC was a glorified Calculator designed for ballistics calculation, Collossus was built for Cracking ENIGMA, I think there's a world of difference between ENIAC and Collossus both in ability, and calculation power.

Granted, Turing was a genius *nods* it's a shame he was taken from us at an early age due to his 'actions inappropriate to society'

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

That is very cool.

While I can understand disassembling them at the end of the war to protect the technological secrets, I'm glad they're not lost forever. It's a wonderful project.

[canisrufus-uk.livejournal.com]

Well they didn't disasemble them all but they had a good reason to keep them secret. During the war the British and Americans never bothered to tell the Russians where they were getting all this inteligence from. After the war the Russians still believed that the ENIGMA and Lorenz cypher machines were unbreakable and so they took them to use themselves.

British inteligence kept a couple of Colossi and a few Bombes(sp?)(Enigma codebreaking machines) and spent the next 10 years reading Russian military trafic and sending a copy across the Atlantic.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Colossus

[ursuscal.livejournal.com]

"This is the voice of Colossus. This is the voice of Guardian. We are one..."

Aha! Now I know where they got the name "Colossus" for the movie! My computer explorer scout post actually built some of the props for that movie, and got a V.I.P. tour of Universal Studios (before it was a major tourist attraction). They still had some of the sets from the movie set up.

Re: Colossus

[acelightning.livejournal.com]