Re: Eye Spy #35 - Colossus

In message <20050929184848.86387.qmail-+54iEU7e6fDGRxTy+Q50vsz6deESKz/[email protected]>,
Matt R <[email protected]> writes
>--- David Hamer <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Here we go again! The current issue of Eye Spy magazine [#35] has
>> a short piece on the Colossus rebuild at BP: "...Colossus...which
>> was used to break the top secret German Enigma codes...": the author
>> managing to fit two errors into that one sentence..! It is not clear
>> who wrote this.
>
>That's unfortunate, particularly since Eye Spy recently did a nice article on
>John Alexander's cipher machine collection (exhibited at BP). Compare MSN
>Encarta's (an encyclopedia) entry on the history of the computer:
>
>   "During World War II a team of scientists and mathematicians, working at
>Bletchley Park, north of London, created one of the first all-electronic
>digital computers: Colossus. By December 1943, Colossus, which incorporated
>1,500 vacuum tubes, was operational. It was used by the team headed by Alan
>Turing, in the largely successful attempt to crack German radio messages
>enciphered in the Enigma code." --


The IWM are equally enlightening. One would expect the guys on this side
of the pond to get it right. From the IWM website:


"Colossus was built for the code-breakers at Bletchley Park by Tommy
Flowers and his team of post office engineers in 1943. Using standard
post office equipment, Tommy Flowers developed a machine that could work
at 5000 characters a second, four times faster than anything built
before. He went on to develop Colossus Mark 2, which could work at five
time faster than the original Colossus.

The computer was as big as a room - 5 metres long, 3 metres deep and 2.5
metres high - and weighed over a ton. It was a development from the
mechanical Bombes. 

Colossus worked by 'reading', through a photoelectric system, a
teleprinter tape containing the letters of the coded message. It read
5,000 letters a second.

All possible combinations of the coded message were checked with the
cypher key generated by Colossus. A teleprinter typed out the results of
Colossus's search, revealing the settings which had been used by the
Germans to send their messages. Ten Colossus Mark 2s were eventually
built. They cracked the Enigma codes and even more complicated ones
devised by the Germans on their 12 -rotor cipher machines. A complete
Mark 2 Colossus machine has recently been rebuilt and is on display at
Bletchley Park."


geoff