Friday, November 16, 2007

Colossus vs PC, Fight

Boing Boing reports Bletchley Park's Colossus codebreaker to race modern PC in cracking Nazi codes: "Tony Sale and a group of British vintage computer enthusiasts is rebuilding Colossus, the gigantic proto-computer that Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park scientists built to crack German codes during WWII. The original Colossus machines were all broken up (into pieces 'no bigger than a man's hand'!) after the war for security reasons, but Sale has tracked down the surviving Colossus engineers and is making great strides in completing the machine. The finished Colossus is to be pitted against a contemporary general-purpose PC in a code-breaking race."

The two source BBC articles are very good:

The past is the future at Bletchley Park

Colossus cracks codes once more

Update: Colossus lost

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