Hi: Last week I was at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park for a splendid event celebrating the fact that 70 years ago to the day the Colossus had broken its first German teleprinter message. The whole process was re-enacted, using the rebuilds of Colossus and Tunny, in front of an invited audience that included a number of people who worked on Colossus during WW2. From the TNMOC news release:
On 5 February 1944 Colossus Mk I attacked its first Lorenz-encrypted message, the highly sophisticated cipher used in communications between Hitler and his generals during World War II.
Designed by brilliant British telephone engineer Tommy Flowers, Colossus was built to speed up code-breaking of the complex Lorenz cipher. By the end of the war there were ten functioning Colossi and they had a decisive impact in shortening the war and saving countless lives.
Colossus was the first electronic computer, but news of its existence was kept top secret for 30 years because of the sophistication and sensitivity surrounding the encryption it had helped to break. . . . The statistics of Colossus are astounding. It occupied the size of a living room (7 ft high by 17 ft wide and 11 ft deep), weighed five tonnes, and used 8kW of power. It incorporated 2,500 valves, 501 of which are thyraton switches, about 100 logic gates and 10,000 resistors connected by 7 km of wiring. Reading 5000 characters per second (faster than anything ever produced commercially), Colossus found the start wheel positions of Lorenz-encrypted messages to enable the decryption of 63 million characters.
Typically, it took Colossus up to four hours to establish the start wheel positions of messages. It is often surmised that the Allies might have been reading some of the decrypted messages even before they reached German High Command. By the end of the war, 63 million characters of high-grade German messages had been decrypted by the 550 people working on the ten functioning Colossi at Bletchley Park. <snip>
The event received a lot of coverage in the UK press and elsewhere - see: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/notes-museum/picture-colossus-70 I particularly recommend the BBC's video of the re-enactment, which is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26015436 Cheers Brian Randell School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell