Colossus
This is a history of Colossus, the world's first fully-functioning electronic, digital computer that was built in the Second World War for codebreaking purposes. It includes only recently de-classified information.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
9mentions
8people
2009–2026years
78% recommend22% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Battle of Wits" by Stephen Budianski
"Colossus" by Jack Copeland
"Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks
- Through no fault of its own, this is a very American-centric view of early computing. I'm pretty sure that at the time this was written, the story of COLOSSUS was still highly classified by the British government. It has since been declassified, and you might read about it in this book [1].
- Exceptions are rare enough to get called out for praise. A few:
Digital Apollo, by David Mindell (development of Apollo guidance and avionics generally)
The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop (technical development leading up to the Arpanet, thence to the Internet)
Colossus, the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking computers, by Jack Copeland et al.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more of the technically unsophisticated junk that Knuth is complaining about, and the excuses offered here rather badly miss the point. ("The history of software is not the history of computer science". Yes, and so? How does a history of software from which all technical detail has been drained away contribute anything of value?)
- There's a good book out - http://www.amazon.com/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-code-breaki...
The book talks about Tutte and Flowers and how they went about building the world's first true computer. It includes schematics and algorithms and other technical details of the machine. Actually, if you're old enough, you probably remember getting told in your first CompSci classes how computers were made up of I/O, a CPU and memory, which even by the 1980s seemed like a quaint way of viewing things. Reading Colussus for the first time, you really understand why they made the distinction in the textbooks. Just the machines to read and write to paper tape were incredibly complicated, and the speed that you could spool paper tape was a limiting factor in the early days. Indeed the first systems didn't really have a memory system, they had to keep re-reading data from tapes. The need to avoid that was the reason they invented memory in the first place - it sped up computer operations by orders of magnitude!
The book also covers in great detail how they went about intercepting the signals from the German High Command - which itself was a very modern digital modulation scheme that hadn't existed until them. The work of the signals interceptors was very impressive too, and run by the British Post Office, if my memory serves correctly :D
- I recently learned about Tommy Flowers and Colossus from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-code-breaki... The British kept Colossus secret for a too long and Flowers did not get enough credit (and von Neumann seems to get too much). BTW, I do recommend the above book. But we warned that it's a collection of essays by different authors so it can be uneven reading.
- Apart from Singh's incredibly famous one, I also quite enjoyed _Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park_[1] for technical history.
The autobiography of Leo Marks: _Between Silk & Cyanide_[2] was a good (although I suspect quite heavily dramatised & exaggerated) read about the more human elements and flaws of pen & paper crypto used by the allied resistance groups.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-code-brea...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Between-Silk-Cyanide-Codemakers-1941-1...
