WWII computer fast as PC
p2pnet.net News:- Between 1939 and 1945, the most advanced and creative forms of mathematical and technological knowledge were combined to master German communications.
British cryptanalysts, Alan Turing at the forefront, changed the course of the Second World War and created the foundation for the modern computer.
In 1991 the Bletchley Park, the wartime home of Allied code breaking, was saved from destruction by Tony Sale and some colleagues. They transformed it into a museum devoted to the recognition and reconstruction of this crucial aspect of world history, which had remained completely secret until the early 1970s.
The above is the intro to Tony Sale’s Codes and Ciphers in the Second World War and one of the projects he’s been running has been the re-build of Colossus, a WWII code-breaking machine and one of the first electronic computers which went online two years before America’s Eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).
And today, 30 Bletchley Park veterans gathered to see Colossus once again as part of D-Day celebrations, says a BBC story here.
Fast as a PC
"When I and some colleagues started, in 1991, the campaign to save Bletchley Park from demolition by property developers, I was working at the Science Museum in London restoring some early British computers," Sales says.
"I believed it would be possible to rebuild Colossus. Nobody believed me. In 1993 I gathered together all the information available. This amounted to the eight 1945 wartime photographs taken of Colossus plus some fragments of circuit diagrams which some engineers had kept quite illegally, as engineers always do!"
Colossus Mk II is now up and humming along nicely and amazingly, it’s "so fast and parallel that a modern PC programmed to do the same code-breaking task takes as long as Colossus to achieve a result," says Sales.
It’s, "not a stored-programme computer," says Sales on his web page. "It is hard-wired and switch-programmed, just like ENIAC. Because of its parallel nature it is very fast, even by today’s standards. The intercepted message, punched on to ordinary teleprinter paper tape, is read at 5,000 characters per second. The sprocket holes down the middle of the tape are read to form the clock for the whole machine. This avoids any synchronisation problems: whatever the speed of the tape, that’s the speed of Colossus. Tommy Flowers once wound up the paper tape drive motor to see what happened. At 9,600 characters per second the tape burst and flew all over the room at 60 mph! It was decided that 5,000 cps was a safe speed.
"At 5,000 cps the interval between sprocket holes is 200 microsecs. In this time Colossus will do up to 100 Boolean calculations simultaneously on each of the five tape channels and across a five character matrix. The gate delay time is 1.2 microsecs which is quite remarkable for very ordinary valves. It demonstrates the design skills of Tommy Flowers and Allen Coombs who re-engineered most of the Mark 2 Colossus.
