5 ms·

The computer that helped win World War II

208 points by baruchel 2mo ago

riazrizvi 2mo ago
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.
- kiwijimm 2mo ago
  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.
  - riazrizvi 2mo ago
    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).
    - phire 2mo ago
      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.
  - jameshart 2mo ago
    ‘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.
    - dboreham 2mo ago
      Having seen the replica, I noticed it has a long continuous tape loop. Was the program "stored" in the paper tape?
      - jameshart 2mo ago
        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.
- adrian_b 2mo ago
  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.
mannanj 2mo ago
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.
- colechristensen 2mo ago
  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)
  - TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
    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.
a-dub 2mo ago
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!
- tetris11 2mo ago
  The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus
  - a-dub 2mo ago
    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.
    - KineticLensman 2mo ago
      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...
  - tialaramex 2mo ago
    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.
CrzyLngPwd 2mo ago
From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos. How far we have come :-p
- crabbuh 2mo ago
  Just what politicians need, lol.
kiaansaraiya 2mo ago
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.
brcmthrowaway 2mo ago
Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?
- hermitcrab 2mo ago
  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.
  - xoxxala 2mo ago
    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 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."
- lukan 2mo ago
  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.
- 2mo ago
hermitcrab 2mo ago
The British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.
- tialaramex 2mo ago
  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.
kubatyszko 2mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- tialaramex 2mo ago
  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.
  - Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
    The fact that Lorenz was broken was kept secret for the longest time. Lots of people don't know about it!
Someone 2mo ago
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-decrypts-to-be-revealed-after-75-years 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).”
- vee-kay 2mo ago
  [dead]
pfdietz 2mo ago
The British also helped with the US Navy attack on Japanese ciphers, didn't they?
- thataccount 2mo ago
  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.
jshier 2mo ago
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).
- a-dub 2mo ago
  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.
- jleyank 2mo ago
  How about this one, although it covers the context of the times…. https://www.amazon.ca/Colossus-Bletchley-Parks-Greatest-Secret/dp/1843543311/ref=asc_df_1843543311?mcid=74d98c6801133151b152a7b14f879057&tag=googleshopc0c-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=706833952781&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4765713133088028103&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9000687&hvtargid=pla-587014414474&psc=1&hvocijid=4765713133088028103-1843543311-&hvexpln=0&gad_source=1 https://www.amazon.ca/Colossus-Bletchley-Parks-Greatest-Secr...
- sixothree 2mo ago
  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/f1548ef2-2420-4c93-9b09-4fadcc847bd3 https://publish.fid-media.de/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c9...
- VogonPoetry 2mo ago
  There are a lot of articles written about early machines available from the (British) Computer Conservation Society. The CCS journal is available online at [1]. One article (with a link to a GitHub) discusses making an FPGA version of Colossus. There are many articles written by people who were involved in early computing in the UK. [1] <https://www.computerconservationsociety.org/resurrection.htm https://www.computerconservationsociety.org/resurrection.htm>
andoma 2mo ago
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.
- t43562 2mo ago
  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.
  - tialaramex 2mo ago
    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)
t43562 2mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7w6YXaNvt8
- RugnirViking 2mo ago
  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.
EdwardAF-IT 2mo ago
[flagged]
RachelF 2mo ago
Flowers had to begin building Colossus out of his own pocket. The British government eventually repaid him, but not in full.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  The amount that humanity as a whole owes to individuals taking on personal risks for the greater good is innumerable.
rsamtravis 2mo ago
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.
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  The subhead, "Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications", makes that clear, and would be far less clickbaity.
ck2 2mo ago
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)
dm319 2mo ago
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...
PradeetPatel 2mo ago
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.
40four 2mo ago
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!
- alex1138 2mo ago
  I despise Imitation Game. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on 'reality' of films and would prefer artistic license (while allowed) is limited but it got so many things wrong Cdr. Denniston's family for example has said his portrayal is utterly wrong to the facts
- shuwix 2mo ago
  Because it's harder to grasp for average broader audience. And a topic about bunch of math geniuses is far less entertaining than a secret spy. Also, that spy is action, mathematician is burried in office.
- Podrod 2mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams

208 points by baruchel 2mo ago

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.

kiwijimm 2mo ago
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.
- riazrizvi 2mo ago
  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).
  - phire 2mo ago
    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.
- jameshart 2mo ago
  ‘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.
  - dboreham 2mo ago
    Having seen the replica, I noticed it has a long continuous tape loop. Was the program "stored" in the paper tape?
    - jameshart 2mo ago
      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.
adrian_b 2mo ago
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.

mannanj 2mo ago

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.

colechristensen 2mo ago
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)
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
  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.

a-dub 2mo ago

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!

tetris11 2mo ago
The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus
- a-dub 2mo ago
  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.
  - KineticLensman 2mo ago
    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...
- tialaramex 2mo ago
  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.

CrzyLngPwd 2mo ago

From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos. How far we have come :-p

crabbuh 2mo ago
Just what politicians need, lol.

kiaansaraiya 2mo ago

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.

brcmthrowaway 2mo ago

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

hermitcrab 2mo ago
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.
- xoxxala 2mo ago
  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 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."
lukan 2mo ago
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.
2mo ago

hermitcrab 2mo ago

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

tialaramex 2mo ago
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.

kubatyszko 2mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
tialaramex 2mo ago
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.
- Kim_Bruning 2mo ago
  The fact that Lorenz was broken was kept secret for the longest time. Lots of people don't know about it!

Someone 2mo ago

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-decrypts-to-be-revealed-after-75-years 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).”

vee-kay 2mo ago
[dead]

pfdietz 2mo ago

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

thataccount 2mo ago
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.

jshier 2mo ago

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).

a-dub 2mo ago
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.
jleyank 2mo ago
How about this one, although it covers the context of the times…. https://www.amazon.ca/Colossus-Bletchley-Parks-Greatest-Secret/dp/1843543311/ref=asc_df_1843543311?mcid=74d98c6801133151b152a7b14f879057&tag=googleshopc0c-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=706833952781&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4765713133088028103&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9000687&hvtargid=pla-587014414474&psc=1&hvocijid=4765713133088028103-1843543311-&hvexpln=0&gad_source=1 https://www.amazon.ca/Colossus-Bletchley-Parks-Greatest-Secr...
sixothree 2mo ago
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/f1548ef2-2420-4c93-9b09-4fadcc847bd3 https://publish.fid-media.de/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c9...
VogonPoetry 2mo ago
There are a lot of articles written about early machines available from the (British) Computer Conservation Society. The CCS journal is available online at [1]. One article (with a link to a GitHub) discusses making an FPGA version of Colossus. There are many articles written by people who were involved in early computing in the UK. [1] <https://www.computerconservationsociety.org/resurrection.htm https://www.computerconservationsociety.org/resurrection.htm>

andoma 2mo ago

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.

t43562 2mo ago
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.
- tialaramex 2mo ago
  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)

t43562 2mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7w6YXaNvt8

RugnirViking 2mo ago
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.

EdwardAF-IT 2mo ago

[flagged]

RachelF 2mo ago

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

fragmede 2mo ago
The amount that humanity as a whole owes to individuals taking on personal risks for the greater good is innumerable.

rsamtravis 2mo ago

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.

dredmorbius 2mo ago
The subhead, "Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications", makes that clear, and would be far less clickbaity.

ck2 2mo ago

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)

dm319 2mo ago

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...

PradeetPatel 2mo ago

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.

40four 2mo ago

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!

alex1138 2mo ago
I despise Imitation Game. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on 'reality' of films and would prefer artistic license (while allowed) is limited but it got so many things wrong Cdr. Denniston's family for example has said his portrayal is utterly wrong to the facts
shuwix 2mo ago
Because it's harder to grasp for average broader audience. And a topic about bunch of math geniuses is far less entertaining than a secret spy. Also, that spy is action, mathematician is burried in office.
Podrod 2mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams