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The computer that helped win World War II

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#21

Post by cjbgkagh »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #14
colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These people still exist, there just isn't the same institutional push to promote them to prominence so you don't know about them.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#22

Post by wat10000 »

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's important to remember that Nazi Germany was not seen as an enemy at first, and many people admired how Hitler had supposedly lifted Germany out of the economic catastrophe of Weimar. Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. It was not an uncommon sentiment that democracy was weak and the Nazis showed us a better way. This sentiment was extremely wrong-headed, but it wasn't a matter of outright sympathizing with the enemy.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#24

Post by xoxxala »

hermitcrab wrote: post #15
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.

The Kriegsmarine had more secure procedures for transmitting the setting key, added more rotors for more possible combinations, and eventually introduced a new Engima with four rotors instead of three. Their transmissions were more difficult to decrypt.

The Luftwaffe were far more lax in their procedures, and Hermann Goring sent many trivial messages that made it easy for Bletchley Park to decrypt.[1] From early 1940 to the end of the war, air force messages were routinely read.

[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma: "Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring was known to use it for trivial communications, including informing squadron commanders to make sure the pilots he was going to decorate had been properly deloused."

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#25

Post by jameshart »

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.

‘Stored program’ is where the debate is. Colossus was ‘programmable’ but the program was not a series of instructions executed in a sequence - it was a single data process executed on the input data against a set of stored registers.

Definitely programmable, definitely capable of computing, but not a ‘stored program’ in the sense we know it today.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#26

Post by tetris11 »

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…

The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#27

Post by tetris11 »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #13

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

Had they not used a reflector pin in the encryption (simplified encrypting/decrypting a message using the same rotor configuration) it would have been far harder to crack, because the pin ensured that no letter could ever encode itself and that greatly reduced the search space

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#28

Post by a-dub »

tetris11 wrote: post #26
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…

The National Museum of Computing (just up the road from Bletchley Park) has a working Colossus

that's what i was describing! :) it's on the bletchley site (they share a parking lot) and was where tony sale and friends rebuilt the colossus.

although i just looked. critically they have different ticket offices. it was a long time ago! either way, worth a visit of both and they make up an excellent way to spend a day.

Re: The computer that helped win World War II

#30

Post by tetris11 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #14
colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hogwash. Humans are masters of innovation, and are highly motivated to solve problems. None of these men worked from the ground up, but built on the groundwork laid down by others (Turing especially).

The world was arguably also less complex back then, so there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to snatch in terms of information theory

Don't let the Hideo Kojima's of the world fool you into believing they did everything themselves. It's an effort of many, many who do it for the love of the craft and are content to receive no praise for it

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