The Computer That Helped Win World War II

bbaruchel 5 days ago 10 commentsRead Article on spectrum.ieee.org

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a-dub•about 1 hour ago

i had the opportunity to visit bletchley about sixteen years ago... one interesting detail was that all the colossus machines were destroyed after the war as they were seen as too powerful and dangerous. it wasn't until years later that the retired telephony engineers (this was where ee excellence lived at the time) who had built them began rebuilding them from memory as a sort of hobby/club centered at bletchley. there used to be a fellow there named tony sale who would tell you all about it, but unfortunately he passed away a few years ago.

super interesting place and worth the short trip out of london! also i believe the term they used was "semi-programmable digital computer." bombes were mechanical search machines that i believe operated on short ciphertext sequences and i believe the big innovation with the colossus was having the ciphertext live on a long optical tape that would be re-read at thousands of characters per second, thus enabling a high speed processing loop of longer sequences. but i am no expert on this!

youngtaff•6 minutes ago

They weren't all destroyed, some were moved to what became GCHQ (UK's equivalent to the NSA)

See Influence and Fate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

It's Tommy Flowers I always felt sorry for, after the war he wanted a loan to build a computer was refused on the grounds that what he wanted to build was impossible. He knew it was possible but couldn't disclose that due to secrecy laws

riazrizvi•about 2 hours ago

It was more of a special-purpose calculation machine than a general purpose computer, as we understand them which are based on von Neummann's architecture.

kiwijimm•about 1 hour ago

It doesn’t resemble the computers of today, but none the less it was indeed a stored program digital computer. The first of its kind. The bombes were more akin to a special purpose calculation machine. Colossus was something a bit more special.

kiaansaraiya•24 minutes ago

An interesting point is that Colossus wasn't solving the same problem as the bombe. People usually group them together due to Bletchley Park, but they attacked different ciphers. It explains why Colossus ended up looking much more like an electronic programmable computer than bombe.

CrzyLngPwd•41 minutes ago

From Collosus the code breaker to AI making talking bear videos, deep fakes, and cat videos.

How far we have come :-p

mannanj•about 2 hours ago

I'll just leave a documentary here that challenged for me the dominant view around world war 2 that I was indoctrinated with.

"Everything is a rich man's trick"

For example it said we funded the nazi's and ford would sell the engines that powered their machines. Our bankers would also advertise in the papers about how Hitler would be a great leader while funding him and German infrastructure. Has anyone seen this doc and knows what about this or anything else of I mean? I really want to have this intellectual, rational conversation about what it could mean if even 1% of the claims made in that video are true. For me, it could point to why reality and selective enforcement of law feels so prevalent, weird and heavy, and unequal justice is so common today.

notjes•33 minutes ago

We have power centers around the globe. Power centers fill a certain void in societies, because nature hates the void. Power centers try grow by influencing, coercing, manipulating, buying, bribing other power centers. Again, a law of nature: entities try to expand. Some fail at it, some don't fail - at first. Just like all other entities in nature. The peasant in the street can profit from it or not. He can be killed by it or not.

Takeway: try to recognize a potentially not profitable grinding operation by power centers. Try not to become a bag hodler :) Ultimately humans can say NO, no matter the power of the manipulation and coercion by power centers.

mrkeen•6 minutes ago

It doesn't seem like fringe conspiracy to me. If you want to tie it to WW2, Hitler declared the superiority of the blonde & blue eyed, but was OK to count Japan and Italy as allies. Reciprocally, Japan and Italy didn't have a problem with Hitler's attitudes either.

I don't know how you'd go further in terms of "what it means" in any deeper sense. Trump praises Netanyahu and Putin. It's all just there on the surface. It's just the world we live in.

colechristensen•about 1 hour ago

I mean Henry Ford was only not a Nazi in the sense that he wasn't a card carrying member of a foreign political organization. There were plenty of similar Nazi supporting executives in corporate America in the 1930s. And why wouldn't there be? It wasn't like fascism was a one time thing led by one person, it was all over Europe and spread to America, much like Communism in the other direction who similarly wanted to remake the world in their image.

It would be a mistake to associate either just with wealth and tax brackets.

Those kinds of documentaries muddle the water by being too conspiratorial and not building an idea of things that actually happened in context instead they're just raising the spectre of one cabal or another. They just make you afraid and say whacko things which is counterproductive to actually recognizing and forming actual resistance to real threats like present day reality show themed fascism by insecure idiots in power. (it was a much scarier time when the fascists were competent)