from the cracking-the-code-with-friction-valves-and-pulleys dept.
GCHQ has released never before seen images of Colossus, the UK's secret code-breaking computer credited with helping the Allies win World War Two:
The intelligence agency is publishing them to mark the 80th anniversary of the device's invention.
It says they "shed new light" on the "genesis and workings of Colossus", which is considered by many to be the first digital computer.
Its existence was kept largely secret until the early 2000s.
[...] The first Colossus began operating from Bletchley Park, the home of the UK's codebreakers, in early 1944. By the end of the war there were 10 computers helping to decipher the Nazi messages.
Fitted with 2,500 valves and standing at more than 2 metres tall, Colossus required a team of skilled operators and technicians to run and maintain it.
[...] Blueprints of its inner workings have also been made public for the first time, along with a letter referring to "rather alarming German instructions" intercepted by Colossus, as well as an audio clip of the machine at work.
Originally spotted on Herbert Bruderer's blog.
Related: Cryptography is the Bombe: Britain's Enigma-Cracker on Display in New Home
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Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey
The UK National Museum of Computing will open its new Bombe gallery this weekend at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes after a successful crowdfunding campaign to put the WWII code-breaking machines on display.
"We even hope to have a Colossus operator veteran present so that they can exchange notes – something they could never do during the war!" said the museum in a statement.
The Bombe was developed as part of Britain's efforts to break Nazi Germany's military ciphers and intercept war plans. Cryptologists used the electro-mechanical machines to speed up their deciphering of Germany's Enigma messages.
"Visitors will be able to see the world-famous Bombe reconstruction in action and learn how it broke Enigma messages – and compare it to the acclaimed working Colossus reconstruction and discover how it was the key to breaking Lorenz messages," the museum added.
[...] Saturday, 23 June, the day that the Bombe gallery opens to the public, is also Alan Turing's 106th birthday. Wartime re-enactors "will bring the history alive and give a sense of the wartime atmosphere" on the day, while families are encouraged to enjoy a cream tea and some retro computer games.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/19/tnmoc_bombe_gallery_opening/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday January 27 2024, @10:09AM (10 children)
Wow! Compare this with today's computers that come with billions of transistors, fit in your pocket, and would outperform even the most powerful supercomputers of yesteryear by orders of magnitude if entire teams of dedicated code monkeys didn't relentlessly dedicate their working lives coding layers upon layers of bloat to slow them right down.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday January 27 2024, @12:01PM
Even comparing the computers of the 1980's to the modern ones is striking. One racked server or your laptop can easily do more work than a computer of that era that took up an ~6000 square foot floor of an office building.
(The things you learn being a second-generation techie)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by BsAtHome on Saturday January 27 2024, @01:22PM (8 children)
Computers are getting faster, software is getting slower: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ [danluu.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @05:43PM (7 children)
Thank you for that link. That follows my perception of computers.
I only skimmed the article and a couple others he linked. He covers much good information, but I don't see anything regarding IRQ.
I'm sure most here know, but for anyone who might not, pressing a key triggers an electrical signal called an IRQ (Interrupt ReQuest) into the CPU. IRQs can be "masked" (blocked) off by software that doesn't want to be interrupted. When the IRQ is unmasked, the CPU shelves what it's doing and program control is temporarily transferred (interrupt vectored) to a "handler"- software that deals with whatever the need is.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my hunch is that keyboard IRQ is being masked (blocked off) in longer and longer times due to more and more software being piled into computers. I'm sure if you ran Windows3.1 on an i9 it'd be stunningly fast.
I have many thoughts and feelings about who should be boss: the user or the software, but maybe another time.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 27 2024, @08:46PM (5 children)
I don't think it's IRQs being masked, I think it's just the many extra layers of thick bloat the CPU has to execute. If you think about things like USB human input devices compared with old keyboards there's quite a large stack of drivers and protocols. Then there's all the user-space code. I hate to think just how thick and bloated that is nowadays. I remember thinking things were getting bad when Word for Windows used to run slow on a 33MHz 486 with 4MB RAM. If that code is written by the sort of people who "just copy and paste from stackoverflow" and is built on top of umpteen frameworks there's no wonder it's slow. I started on 8-bit micros. The keyboard handling routine was a couple of dozen bytes of Z80 machine code that polled the gates once every 50th of a second. Printing characters to the screen was a case of copying 8 bytes from ROM in to RAM. That was snappy at 3.54MHz.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @09:12PM (4 children)
Okay, maybe not IRQs specifically, but user input is going into a "ignore it for a while" queue. If I was the Chief Architect of a computer / OS, there would be an edict that user input processing latency would never be longer than 2mS or so, regardless of the piles and piles of code.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 27 2024, @09:19PM (3 children)
You'd need a hard realtime OS to make that sort of guarantee, and it would also rule out all different kinds of things in user space, like garbage-collected languages, virtual machines (Java, C#) and so on.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @10:35PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemption_(computing) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday January 28 2024, @11:02AM (1 child)
So the kernel can service the interrupts and call back into user space. If you have hundreds of megabytes of bloat and non-deterministic stuff in user space to execute before your input makes it to the screen that still needs to be executed. It's quite a problem.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday January 28 2024, @06:49PM
I'm just saying that code-bloated stuff can be preempted; user response time in fact can be a priority. I need to do (much) more research, some day...
I know there are optimized versions and sub-versions of Linux for finer-grained needs like audio/video work. The same response-time priority could be given to the poor meatbag.
Cynical me thinks it's all part of grooming us to accept our silicon-based overlords.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 27 2024, @08:50PM
Also, if your user interface is written in a managed language with garbage collection, there's no knowing when the code's going to execute. It might be now or in 500ms. This is what gave Java a bad reputation all those years ago. Overall, the JVM was quite fast, but the execution of the code was very intermittent, which humans perceive as being slow and jerky in a GUI. There's a reason that the mouse cursor got the highest priority thread on Windows.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 27 2024, @10:24AM (6 children)
Why did they need to keep it secret for so long?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 27 2024, @01:56PM (1 child)
Seems crazy, doesn't it? I'm left wondering what the Brits did with Colossus after the war. I'm sure they didn't dismantle everything around the project on VE day or even VJ day. They probably had secret stuff running on it until the 50s, maybe even the early 60s. What exactly superseded Colossus?
Whatever, it seems that everything in Colossus should have been 3 or 4 generations obsolete by 1970.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday January 29 2024, @02:58PM
Official history is that the machines themselves and the plans were destroyed. I think this was highly unlikely. The UK wanted other countries (allies and otherwise) to think that the encryption systems that the Germans developed were unbreakable. Then the UK could spy on allies and others. It's possible that the original Colossus machines were destroyed and better machines were constructed in secret.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @05:16PM
Purely speculating but maybe it's just the general philosophy of keeping a tight lid on such important things like military secrets. Cold War pretty much started right after WWII with huge division between USSR and the West.
That, coupled with: when do you start letting people know about it, and how much do you divulge and when. Colossus was way advanced tech for its time. Its complexities and optimizations were probably never duplicated, mostly because as transistors came into play, you could put far more circuits in a given cabinet size, and get more performance by brute force (more bits, more specific execution circuits / systems).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Sunday January 28 2024, @12:31PM (2 children)
Because machines like the enigma and the lorenze where in use after the war. Why tell the world you cracked them? They just liked being able to spy on everybody.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday January 28 2024, @03:47PM (1 child)
For 80 years?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by pe1rxq on Sunday January 28 2024, @04:52PM
No, but once you mark stuff as a secret it tends to become harder to release it later. The longer you wait the more embarassing it can get. At some point it becomes 'convenient' to pretend it never happened.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by looorg on Saturday January 27 2024, @02:42PM
How did those images "shed new light" on things? They look almost like old phone switches in some regard. Looks like more or less every other image of the Colossus I have seen before.
Great. Now we can all build our own! Except all I can find is a very not so good faded image of the circuit diagram where a lot of it is basically unreadable.
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/16917-gchq-celebrates-80-years-of-colossus.html [i-programmer.info]
That is a bit weird. I guess it was a machine built to a specific task so it couldn't be used or retooled for anything else. So it had served its purpose and there was not really any refitting. Space is at a premium since they now had to install more machines designed to break soviet encryption instead.
https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news/colossus-80 [gchq.gov.uk]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snotnose on Saturday January 27 2024, @03:44PM (3 children)
Can it make nude pics of Taylor Swift?
I didn't think so.
Bad decisions, great stories
(Score: 4, Funny) by looorg on Saturday January 27 2024, @04:03PM (1 child)
Given enough time I'm sure it could create some kind of ASCII type likeness that would make you blush.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 29 2024, @05:29PM
It snot that difficult.
https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/asciiart/ [paulbourke.net]
"Standard" character ramp for grey scale pictures, black -> white.
"$@B%8&WM#*oahkbdpqwmZO0QLCJUYXzcvunxrjft/\|()1{}[]?-_+~i!lI;:,"^`'. "
A more convincing but shorter sequence for representing 10 levels of grey is
" .:-=+*#%@"
Generate a deepfake image. Divide it into blocks of pixels. Average the gray value of pixels in each block. Map the luminance levels of each block to the appropriate character. Print the characters.
If a lazy person with no education can cross the border and take your job, we need to upgrade your job skills.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @05:45PM
Given a million years and a million typewriters, ... oh never mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2024, @03:03AM
Tommy Flowers already did that.
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/tommy-flowers-the-man-who-built-colossus [interestingengineering.com]