Power of the Colossus

[Tugdual]

Was reading on the colossus today that was used by the British during 2nd WW to decipher German messages. It is said that the colossus being parallel can compare with today PCs in terms of power. Not sure when the article was written but this seems today vastly overstated. The Colossus could manage 5000cps with concurrent 100 operations (probably one bit since these are valves) which is equivalent to 500KHz.
I was wondering if we would have had better results with a simple 50g :-)

[Dave Britten]

(05-31-2015 03:54 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  Was reading on the colossus today that was used by the British during 2nd WW to decipher German messages. It is said that the colossus being parallel can compare with today PCs in terms of power. Not sure when the article was written but this seems today vastly overstated. The Colossus could manage 5000cps with concurrent 100 operations (probably one bit since these are valves) which is equivalent to 500KHz.
I was wondering if we would have had better results with a simple 50g :-)

Going in reverse, I'm always fascinated that my desktop computer at work probably has more computing power than the entire world had available just 40 years ago, and yet real work could still be done comfortably with just a humble HP 65 or 67. I think we've simply invented new data processing "needs" to justify having such an obscene amount of computational power.

[Les Bell]

(05-31-2015 07:02 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I think we've simply invented new data processing "needs" to justify having such an obscene amount of computational power.

Many years ago - 1985 or thereabouts - Bill Gates was keynote speaker at a local conference. I was surprised to hear him say that MS had developed Windows with three goals in mind:

• Graphical interface
• Multitasking
• "to stimulate consumer demand for more sophisticated hardware"
  

I almost fell out of my chair at the last item. Perhaps he was reusing a speech he'd given to a bunch of hardware manufacturers. But it's been an open secret for many years that hardware vendors were happy to bundle Windows because it would bring users back for upgrades before too long.

These days, we've got so much compute power in servers, in particular, that we use virtualization as a way of sharing one physical box across multiple virtual computers. And if you really want to suck up CPU cycles, there's always statistical learning on "Big Data".

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

The Colossus was a very interesting computer story that took many years before the truth came out. The British really believe in upholding their Secrecy Act. As a result, their computer industry may well have been delayed in the early days.

A pretty good book on the Colossus is:

Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers
by Jack Copeland.

I had read the Kindle version, but I now see that you can read it at following web page:

Colossus Book

Bill
Smithville, NJ