Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer
Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer, was developed at Bletchley Park to break the German Tunny cipher, significantly impacting World War II and advancing computing technology.
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Colossus was the first large-scale electronic computer, developed at Bletchley Park during World War II to break the German Tunny cipher, a sophisticated teleprinter encryption system. The Tunny machine, produced by the German Lorenz company, was crucial for secure communications among the German High Command. Bletchley Park began intercepting Tunny messages in June 1941 and successfully decrypted them by July 1942, providing vital intelligence that significantly influenced the war's outcome. The Tunny system utilized a series of twelve encoding wheels to encrypt messages, which were transmitted as ciphertext without the operators seeing the encrypted content. Unlike the Enigma machine, which required manual input and was slower, Tunny allowed for rapid automatic encryption and decryption. The process involved adding a key-stream to the plaintext, enabling the receiving machine to decrypt the message by reversing the addition. Colossus's development marked a significant advancement in computing and laid the groundwork for modern computers. The success of the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park, particularly with Colossus, is credited with saving countless lives and altering the course of the war.
- Colossus was the first large-scale electronic computer, used to break the German Tunny cipher.
- The Tunny machine was more advanced than the Enigma, allowing for faster encryption and decryption.
- Bletchley Park successfully decrypted Tunny messages starting in July 1942, providing critical intelligence.
- The process of encryption involved adding a key-stream to plaintext, which was reversed for decryption.
- The work at Bletchley Park significantly impacted the outcome of World War II and advanced computing technology.
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6 commentshttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
I think the main innovation was the use of valves (similar to tube logic), while other machines of the day used relay logic.
This thing wasn’t really a computer though, in that it was not turing complete, since there wasn’t any support for branching or programmatic examination of its output.
Instead, the operators would tell it what to run, look at the result, then manually apply a flowchart to decide what operation to take next.
These first turing complete machine that “worked” was probably the Z3 from 1941. It was electromechanical and ran at one hz (vs the colossus which ran at 5000hz starting in 1942).
It’s unclear to me if the z1 or z2 were turing complete or not. The z1 supported floating point(!)
This article gives an overview of more machines, and links to articles about most of them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardwar...
PS. Bletchley is around an hour on the train from London Euston. Bear in mind that even though the museum of computing is located in the old Bletchley park complex, it requires a separate ticket from the main Bletchley Park museum.
One of my favorites movies: Colosssus: The Forbin Project
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