Monday, December 21, 2015

Colossus was the 1st electronic digital programmable computing device, and was employed to break German ciphers during World War II.
During World Warfare II, the British at Bletchley Park achieved a amount of successes at breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption appliance, Enigma , was first attacked with the help of your electro-mechanical bombes . To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SZ 40/42 appliance, used for high-level Army communications, Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to develop the Colossus . [31] He spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building the 1st Colossus. [32] After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus ended up being shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 16 January 1944[33] and attacked its first message on 5 March. [31]
Colossus was the world's first electronic digital camera programmable computer. [19] It used a numerous valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform various boolean logical operations on its data, but it has not been Turing-complete . Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total). Colossus Level I contained 1500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Level II with 2400 valves, was both 5 times faster and much better to operate than Mark 1, greatly speeding the decoding process.

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