[GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...

[Dino Papas]

Although it's still in my "to read" queue there is an interesting  
volume describing Colossus:

"Colossus - The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers"
by Jack Copeland and others
Oxford University Press (www.oup.com)
ISBN: 0-19-284055-X

73 - Dino KL0S

On 3Mar2009, at 8:28 AM, Craig Sawyers wrote:

>> That is fascinating!
>
> The very first machine, Colossus, of which ten were built for  
> Bletchley Park
> during WWII were all destroyed (and the plans) on Churchill's orders.
> Although an identical working replica of Colossus is now at  
> Bletchley, it is
> not of course an original - not one single component part.  In any  
> event,
> Colossus was not a stored programme computer - is used a continous  
> loop of
> punched paper tape to hold the cipher text passing a bank of  
> photocells at
> 60mph.  The sprocket holes were used to generate the clock signal.   
> It was
> really much more like a maths coprocessor running a statistical  
> algorithm
> than a general purpose programmable computer.