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I remember being there and chatting to the engineer who was trying to keep the machine running. As I talked to him, Colossus crashed. It was apparently a full-time job maintaining all the mercury tubes at the correct temperature so that the memory continued to function properly...
From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos. How far we have come :-p
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Years passed between the Nazis taking power and the outbreak of war. Sure but the rhetoric of hate and disastrously racist things were happening well before the war took place and soon after the party took power. It wasn't some mystery that these were terrible people, the extent of awareness of what they were capable of just got gradually worse. In an age of bigotry they were still extreme but not THAT extreme if th…
Can anyone recommend a more technical book on the design and operation of the Colossus? I've found Colossus, a collections of essays edited by B. Jack Copeland, but not much else, at least on Amazon. (Also interested in anything on Zuse's computers, as I've mostly studied the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and Eniac).
There are many articles written by people who were involved in early computing in the UK.
[1] https://www.computerconservationsociety.org/resurrection.htm>
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…
> telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time) Same in the US. It's why computers live in 19-inch racks.
The mention Turing a little bit, but I really enjoyed the movie “The Imitation Game” about Turing building the “Bombe” machine and eventually breaking the Enigma code, and the effect that had on the war. Highly recommend!
Interesting how this technological war behind the scenes probably had a disproportionately large effect on the war compared to how little you hear about it in text books or history class growing up. The mention Turing a little bit, but I really enjoyed the movie “The Imitation Game” about Turing building the “Bombe” machine and eventually breaking the Enigma code, and the effect that had on the war. Highly recommend!
Cdr. Denniston's family for example has said his portrayal is utterly wrong to the facts
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…
Tony Sale saved Bletchley Park. He was the instigator of the foundation and basically ran it single handed for a while. He believed deeply in it being preserved for the nation. His main claim to fame before that was being Peter Wright’s right-hand man. Wright’s “Spycatcher”, talks of their joint exploits over the years. I got to ask Tony about it once, he was not too impressed Wright had done what he had done by writ…