The National Museum of Computing (Bletchley park Site)Colossus
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 11:12
It was once so top secret that even its technicians didn’t know what it was used for. But on his eightieth birthday, the British intelligence service GCHQ is allowed to share photos of Colossus, the device that can be seen as the first modern computer.
On January 18, 1944, Colossus was delivered to Bletchley Park, where the brightest mathematicians and computer pioneers were deployed to crack the German code messages. Alan Turing’s ‘Bombe’, for example, had been deciphering Nazi messages in the Enigma code there for several years.
Colossus had to work with the code that Hitler used to communicate with his generals. New technology was used for this: mechanical circuits were replaced by 2500 electron tubes, making Colossus much faster than its predecessors.
The National Museum of Computing (Bletchley park Site)Colossus
This actually made Colossus the first electronic computer. The device could process 5000 characters per second. An encrypted message could be cracked within hours, instead of code breakers having to work on it for weeks.
The machine bore little resemblance to later PCs. Colossus weighed 1,000 kilos, was 2 meters high and took up an entire room. Software did not yet exist, Colossus was programmed by converting switches, plugs and cables. Only when microchips replaced vacuum tubes did computers become less cumbersome.
The National Museum of Computing (Bletchley park Site)Colossus
Ultimately, Bletchley Park would field ten Colossi. Their extra computing power came at just the right time: in the run-up to D-Day, messages were deciphered showing that Hitler expected the invasion at Calais, not Normandy. Because 63 million characters were ultimately decrypted, the war would have ended two years earlier, according to some estimates.
After the war, eight examples were dismantled. Because the last two, Red and Blue, were used during the Cold War to reveal Soviet secrets, the existence of the computer remained top secret. It was only this century that its existence was finally revealed.
GCHQSchematic representation of Colossus
Because Colossus was so secret, even those who worked with it regularly did not know exactly what it could do, says a GCHQ technician in the press release that was published with the new photos.
“It wasn’t for me to know,” Bill Marshall recalls. “It was my job to fix it when it was broken. I had some circuit diagrams for that, not a detailed manual.”
Marshall is pleased that his work has made a small contribution to this important device. “We can all be proud of what has been achieved in the name of national security.”
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2024-01-18 10:12:28
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