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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
(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.