80 years later, GCHQ releases new images of Nazi code-breaking computer
80 years later, GCHQ releases new images of Nazi code-breaking computer
GCHQ unveils new docs on Colossus, a 1943 marvel that let allies "read Hitler's mind."
Today several photos and documents were released of the earliest, and most secret, computers.
I'm adding Tommy Flowers, post office engineer turned computer whiz, to my list of tech heroes.
I wondered how this related to Alan Turing's now-famous work cracking Enigma. TIL.
Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see Banburismus) contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. (Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.)
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Thomas Harold Flowers MBE (22 December 1905 - 28 October 1998) was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.
In the Munich Museum of Technology there is a section devoted to communication and computing. In it are all kinds of noteworthy equipment. They have real pieces of different mainframes and switches. They also have a mockup of Collasus, which I found interesting. Highly recommend.
They held off on sharing til now, just in case those Jerries got wise to any ciphers that needed cracked
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Thursday, the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) announced the release of previously unseen images and documents related to Colossus, one of the first digital computers.
These 2-meter-tall electronic beasts played an instrumental role in breaking the Lorenz cipher, a code used for communications between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe.
Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind its construction, used over 2,500 vacuum tubes to create logic gates, a precursor to the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers.
The GCHQ's public sharing of archival documents includes several photos of the computer at different periods and a letter discussing Tommy Flowers' groundbreaking work that references the interception of "rather alarming German instructions."
After starting work on a rebuilding project in the 1990s, engineer Tony Sale completed a 90 percent operational reconstruction of a Colossus Mark 2 in 2007 that is now displayed at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
Andrew Herbert, chairman of trustees at The National Museum of Computing, told the GCHQ that Colossus was a key part of the Allies' success during World War II.
The original article contains 483 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!