The computer that helped win World War II • Hacker News Board

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#11

Post by youngtaff » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

a-dub wrote: post #5

i had the opportunity to visit bletchley about sixteen years ago... one interesting detail was that all the colossus machines were destroyed after the war as they were seen as too powerful and dangerous. it wasn't until years later that the retired telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time) who had built them began rebuilding them from memory as a sort of hobby/club centered at bletchley. th…

They weren't all destroyed, some were moved to what became GCHQ (UK's equivalent to the NSA)

See Influence and Fate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

It's Tommy Flowers I always felt sorry for, after the war he wanted a loan to build a computer was refused on the grounds that what he wanted to build was impossible. He knew it was possible but couldn't disclose that due to secrecy laws

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#12

Post by riazrizvi » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

kiwijimm wrote: post #4

riazrizvi wrote: post #2

It was more of a special-purpose calculation machine than a general purpose computer, as we understand them which are based on von Neummann's architecture.

It doesn’t resemble the computers of today, but none the less it was indeed a stored program digital computer. The first of its kind. The bombes were more akin to a special purpose calculation machine. Colossus was something a bit more special.

It was the first programmable electronic digital computing machine, yes. Special-purpose computing machines had been around since the 1600's (where they were used as textile weaving machines I think).

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#13

Post by brcmthrowaway » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#14

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #6

mannanj wrote: post #3

I'll just leave a documentary here that challenged for me the dominant view around world war 2 that I was indoctrinated with. "Everything is a rich man's trick" For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc…

I mean Henry Ford was only not a Nazi in the sense that he wasn't a card carrying member of a foreign political organization. There were plenty of similar Nazi supporting executives in corporate America in the 1930s. And why wouldn't there be? It wasn't like fascism was a one time thing led by one person, it was all over Europe and spread to America, much like Communism in the other direction who similarly wanted to…

It was a much scarier time because far more people were far more competent.

I doubt that if you took the smartest people today and equipped them with the knowledge and resources around at the time - and no more than that, so no modern insights or historical knowledge - they'd be able to do what Turing, Flowers, and the others did.

Reverse engineering and breaking an encryption protocol by hand and then mechanising it with just math and valve technology was an astounding achievement.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#15

Post by hermitcrab » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #13

Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?

The fact that the Enigma never encoded a letter as itself was a significant flaw in the design, which could presumably have been avoided.

Better training for the operators would also have helped, e.g. don't start every message with "Heil Hitler". Some of the services were much better than the others IIRC.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#16

Post by hermitcrab » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

The British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#17

Post by lukan » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #13

Was there anything the Germans could have done to make Enigma foolproof encryption like we have in the modern day?

Also today there is no foolproof encryption if you make misstakes (or if an unknow attacker knows more about math than you do, or made a working quantum computer)

And what nazi germany could have done back then, to not have it broken would have been very simple: not using prussian style of communication, meaning all the messages followed a certain pattern with certain keywords. Since the british knew those keywords and pattern, they had something of an angle to break it. (Parts of it are covered in the article)

Or of course use another layer of encryption (but that requires a simple redesign) which would have made the decryption not useful in a timely manner.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#18

Post by lukan » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #10

mannanj wrote: post #3

I'll just leave a documentary here that challenged for me the dominant view around world war 2 that I was indoctrinated with. "Everything is a rich man's trick" For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc…

It doesn't seem like fringe conspiracy to me. If you want to tie it to WW2, Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. Reciprocally, Japan and Italy didn't have a problem with Hitler's attitudes either. I don't know how you'd go further in terms of "what it means" in any deeper sense. Trump praises Netanyahu and Putin. It's all just there on the surface.…

" Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. "

Hitler himself was not blond or blue eyed. So .. inferiority complex is a dangerous thing.

As for everything was a conspiracy .. I advise to read a bit more about that time. The german rich elite also thought they could control hitler and use him against the communists.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#19

Post by Hikikomori » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

mannanj wrote: post #3

I'll just leave a documentary here that challenged for me the dominant view around world war 2 that I was indoctrinated with. "Everything is a rich man's trick" For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc…

[flagged]

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#20

Post by tialaramex » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #16

The British government gave/sold Enigma machines to various allies after the war. Somehow forgetting to mention that they could decrypt them. Cunning.

Colossus isn't for Enigma, it's to attack Lorenz aka "Tunny".

Enigma is among the last of an obsolete YOLO approach to encrypting written text. On the other hand Lorenz, like the systems Britain and her allies were also using, is a stream cipher, not ultimately so different from say ChaCha20 except that Lorenz is broken and ChaCha20 is not. Lorenz uses streams of 5-bit codes whereas today we'd think in 8-bit bytes, but fundamentally it's the same idea.

Attacking this needed a much more sophisticated machine, enter Colossus, a physical realisation of the idea that Computation can be performed by a machine.