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The Colossus machines were electronic computing devices used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German messages during World War II.
Colossus was designed by engineer Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill with input from mathematician Max Newman and group at Bletchley Park. The prototype, Colossus Mark I, was shown working in December 1943 and was operational at Bletchley Park by February 1944. An improved Colossus Mark II was first installed in June 1944, with input from Allen Coombs, and ten Colossi had been constructed by the end of the war.
Colossus - The First Electronic Computer - Pt1
Colossus - The First Electronic Computer - Pt2
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The Colossus computers were used to help decipher teleprinter messages which had been encrypted using the Lorenz SZ40/42 machine. Colossus compared two data streams, counting each match based on a programmable boolean function. The encrypted message was read at high speed from a paper tape. The other stream was generated internally, and was an electronic simulation of the Lorenz machine at various trial settings. If the match count for a setting was above a certain threshold, it would be output on an electric typewriter.
An amateur cryptographer has beaten Colossus in a code-cracking challenge set up to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.
The competition saw Colossus return to code-cracking duties for the first time in more than 60 years.
The team using Colossus managed to decipher the message just after lunch on 16 November.
But before that effort began Bonn-based amateur Joachim Schuth revealed he had managed to read the message.
"He has written a suite of software specifically for the challenge," said Andy Clark, one of the founders of the Trust for the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where Colossus is sited.
I went up to Bletchley Park yesterday, and felt the white heat ofthe technological revolution -- specifically, the heat given off byroughly 2,500 valves (vacuum tubes), some of them dating back to thewar. The Colossus Mark II code-breaking machine has been rebuilt thanksto the efforts of Tony Sale, and it was working fine.
Today, the machine is officially in action. In fact, it's being used tocrack German codes in the way it did during World War II. In this case,however, they are friendly messages that have been encrypted using aLorenz SZ42 machine and transmitted by radio hams in the Heinz NixdorfMuseumForum, Paderborn, Germany. Amusingly, Bletchley had to lend theGermans their Lorenz SZ42.
The Bletchley Park site has more details of The Colossus Rebuild Project. Tony Sale also helped with the code-breaking aspects of Enigma, a film based on a Robert Harris thriller.
My photo shows the back of Colossus Mark II, which you wouldn't usually see. It's not somethng you'd want to reconstruct from scratch, is it?
Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes.
"A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does," he said.
It was so fast, he said, because it was a single purpose processor rather than one put to many general purposes like modern desktop computers.
BBC wrote:
Mr Sale it could be Friday before the teams find out if they have managed to read the enciphered messages correctly.
Re-building the pioneering machine took so long because all 10 Colossus machines were broken up after the war in a bid to keep their workings secret. When he started the re-build all Mr Sale had to work with were a few photographs of the machine.
In its heyday Colossus could break messages in a matter of hours and, said Mr Sale, proved its worth time and time again by revealing the details of Germany's battle plans.
"It was extremely important in the build up to D-Day," said Mr Sale. "It revealed troop movements, the state of supplies, state of ammunition, numbers of dead soldiers - vitally important information for the whole of the second part of the war."
The Cipher Challenge is also being used to mark the start of a major fund-raising drive for the fledgling National Museum of Computing. The museum will be based at Bletchley and Colossus will form the centre-piece of its exhibits.
Colossus has a place in the history of computing not just because of the techniques used in its construction.
Many of those that helped build it, in particular Tommy Flowers, went on to do work that directly led to the computers in use today.
The museum said it needed to raise about £6m to safeguard the future of the historic computers it has collected.
Walk around ColossusA detailed tour of the replica Colossus – make sure to click on the"More Text" links on each image to see the informative detailed textabout that part of Colossus
IEEE lecture – Transcript of a lecture Tony Sale gave describing the reconstruction project
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