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| Colossus |
Colossus has been restored! Colossus, in case you forgot, was the granddaddy of all electronic computing machinery. It was installed in Bletchley Park (where did they get that awful name?) during WWII and was used to decrypt code used by the German staff. It was like the 2nd generation of machinery developed for this purpose. The first generation was used for decrypting messages Germany was sending to their U-boats. I found the link on Andy's Retro Computers. Here is the picture of the eclectic mansion that stands in for what was really going on,
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| Bletchley Park |
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| Map of Bletchley Park |
Here is a Google map. At this scale you can see all the buildings involved in the wartime project. The placemark is centered on the lawn in front of the mansion. If you zoom in you can tell it's the mansion because of the blue-green color of the roof at one end. The housing development along the left hand side is not part of the park.
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This whole thing is about 45 miles NW of London. There was a movie "Enigma", parts of which were set in Bletchley Park.
Update September 2016 replaced missing pictures, except for the aerial view.
4 comments:
Thanks for the link to my website!
Charles,
at least please spell it correctly
COLOSSUS. Then get you facts right!
Nor was it used to break the U-boat codes. U-boots used Enigma and were broken - inter alia - using Turing Bombes.
Colossus was used to break the Siemens T52 as used by Hitler's general staff. That's a Vernam cipher of 5 parallel bitstreams, the T52 using 10 mutually prime rotors to generate a long pseudorandom bitstream to XOR with the plaintext.
Okay, I doubled the wrong letter. Double L, double S, who's gonna notice? Stu, that's who. I thought I checked the spelling. Obviously I my mind slipped a couple of gears. I'm glad someone was watching me. I sort of knew that Colossus wasn't used on the Engima, but it might be the closest artifact we have to that undertaking. My whole point is that this was a huge undertaking, thousands of people working for years. It wasn't just a couple of eggheads in some fancy English country house. That's why I liked the movie, it gave some idea of the scale of the operation.
Besides, we have you to help keep our facts straight. Thank you, Stu.
Been to Bletchley Park a couple of times. There's Zygalski sheets and a couple of restored Turing Bombes all used to break the Enigma.
They also sell a single wheel Enigma toy. I wrote a paper on it (published at West Point) and showed how to cryptanalyse it without doing any maths. See
http://home.egge.net/~savory//pocket_enigma.htm
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