Electronic Logical Machine The Colossus example essay topic

Prepared for Victor Smolensk y IDS 375 By Luis Rio December 6, 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 The story of the colossus 3 contribution of the colossus 5 Conclusion 7 Appendix A Bibliography V THE COLOSSUS: A GREAT INVENTION OF WWII Introduction Excellent decisions consist of good information. For ages people have needed to do arithmetic calculations and has found them time consuming and difficult. Many historic technological inventions were introduced including the British Colossus. During World War II the German military depended on a machine called the Enigma to daily change the encoding of messages they sent. In 1943 Alan Turing helped design the British Colossus, a completely electronic computer capable of deciphering the German encoding schemes. The Germans declared the Enigma as a perfectly secure machine; they believe that no other machine can replace it.

Almost all German communications were enciphered on the Enigma cipher machine. It was based on rotors whose movements produced ever-changing alphabetic substitutions. The ciphers it produced were supposed to be unbreakable even by someone in possession of the machine. Ideas of great logical ingenuity were needed to defeat it. If it was not for the British's invention of the Colossus World War II would has lasted along longer. It was at Bletchley Park that the British code-breakers monitored and read the top-secret communications between members of the German high command.

In 1939, the best British mathematicians, scientists and engineers were brought together to develop a way to crack the Enigma. They were told to interpret code written on Germany's Lorenz ciphers, which were machines built from wheels and gears that could however generate inexplicably difficult cryptograms. By 1943, although the Allies could decode German messages, they could not do so in time to help Allied field commanders. The machines that were used by the British used to decode the Lorenz messages were slow and unreliable, and often caught fire. Today, Bletchley Park is the United Kingdom's first computer museum.

They had to come up with something that was fast in speed and very reliable that would show some good result. In fact they did by invented the colossus and the result were they decoded the messages and shortened the wartime. Early on in WWII, British intelligence found out, without the Germans realizing, how the German secret code for their military communications worked. The electronic logical machine the colossus was designed and built by December 1943 by a team including Alan Turing, Max Newman, Thomas Flowers and Charles Wynn-Williams. These intelligent people remind me of today's Systems Analyst where they solve businesses problems with computers.

As it says in the Encyclopedia of Careers and Vocational Guidance, the first major advances in modern computer technology were made during World War II. After the war, people thought that computers were too big to be used for anything other than government projects. Today, computers are everywhere, from business of all kinds, to government agencies, charitable organizations, and private homes. The Story of the Colossus As mentioned earlier the Colossus was built at Bletchley Park. The historians at Bletchley declare that it was the world's first electronic computer, but the Americans argue to have been first with EN IAC. Before war broke out in 1939 the Germans had planned a special way tool keeping their communications secret, unfortunately it did not turn out the way they planned it.

The British at Bletchley Park have managed to get a hold of an Enigma machine but they had not managed to get a hold of a copy of the book detailing the wheel positions for each day. Working manually the code breakers at Bletchley Park were able to decipher the messages, the only trouble was that it took them months, by which time the information was out of date. One day the British learned that the Germans had just expanded the Enigma machine by adding a further 3 wheels, this now meant that there were millions of combinations and it was now impossible to decode a message. Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician, "the father of computer logic" was sent to join the team at Blethcly park.

In addition a Post Office engineer name Tommy Flowers had been working on the idea of using Valves, as electronic switches to replace the mechanical switches used in the telephone network. When the British Government hear of Mr. Flower's idea they sent him to Bletchley Park that his idea would prove useful to the code breaking. Tommy Flowers, under the direction of Professor Max A. Newman set to work to build the first electronic programmable computer. The result, in 1943, was "Colossus" a computer containing 1500 valves. The Colossus was so Successful messages could be deciphered within a few hours of being received.

Suddenly the British Government knew of the German plan within house of them being transmittal. The Colossus was kept a secret that is why it is not in most history books. The irony is that Colossus was made largely of standard post office parts, and when it was broken apart, the parts went back into the spares bin ant the PO laboratories at Doll is Hill. Indeed, some telephone exchanges around the country may still be using some of these parts, salvaged from one of the world's first computers. As mentioned by Jason Pont in "The Colossus made decrypting the Lorenz codes practical in time for D-Day on June 6, 1944. In less than two hours it could deduce the wheel settings used by the operator of the individual Lorenz machine that had transmitted a message.

The Settings were then fed into another, simpler device called a Tinny machine, which actually deciphered the message. By the end of the war in 1945, there were ten Colossi, eavesdropping on all the communications on an unsuspecting German high command". People working on the project could not mention anything about it. For example Mr. Flowers was forbidden to discuss his work.

The Colossus was a secret until 1970. Most of the Colossi that were constructed using his design were destroyed in 1946. The Colossus could do logical operations at high speed; it stored data internally, in fixed and alterable stores, carries out a sequence of operations, and did conditional branching. The resulting of the Colossus computers was a remarkable achievement. They worked for 24 hours a day from the time they were installed until the end of the war providing the calculation power required to decode the German messages. They were extremely specialized and very effective.

The Colossus was twice as fast as the Enigma. Contribution of the Colossus The colossus has some influence on the development of computers but not much. It built up British expertise in logical electronic machines, however, unlike other great machines that were invented, because the existence of the Colossus was not publicly admitted until the 1970's meant that its influence was limited. Recently the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham England, officially declassified its documentation of the Colossus project, releasing a two-volume report to the Public Record Office, the national achieve for the entire United Kingdom.

Based on plans developed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the Colossus changes the course of World War II and established the groundwork for modern computers. Since the Colossus was destructed after the war a couple of years back it was rebuilt by a bright gentleman name Tony Sales. Ian Foley, a London network manager said "Sales sorted out how to reassemble the machine from the few scraps of technical information he could lay his hands on". Due to the British government's refusal to release technical information about the Colossus Project, there is a bit of an international tussle over whether the British or Americans should be credited with developing the fist electronic digital computer. After the credit was given to the British government had carefully shielded all information about the technical details about the Colossus. "It is believed that they wanted to continue to use it during the Korean War, and so they did not want attention drawn to the Project.

It was too late for the Colossus developers to get any credit for their accomplishments because of the late release of information. The code-breaking methods used in the Second World War seem very old-fashioned to us. But the work at Bletchley Park led directly to the development of the computers we use today. The computing power of the room-sized Colossus can now be put into a Pentium microprocessor no bigger than a thumb.

Modern computers can create incredible complicated codes. Other computers can only break these thousands of times more powerful than Colossus. The codes, which protect the security of vast networks such as banking systems and the Internet, were though to be unbreakable. But computer hackers have found their way into these systems.

What can we learn from this part of our history as more and more information is transmitted electronically and encrypted? This proves to us that code can never be unbreakable. Clearly some codes require a great deal of effort to break, but it is worth the effort, someone will do it. The ingenuity and persistence of these code breakers is something we can look back on and marvel at. Over the years technology has continued to shrink computer size and increase speed at an unprecedented rate. Today many people enjoy working with computers.

The computer is a development where some people seemed concerned, and other are taking advantage of the great opportunities of a lifetime. 7.