On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 09:34 +0100, Adrian F. Clark wrote:
Tony Sale. These old guys are amazingly ingenious. For example, seeing he needed some kind of widget when re-building Colossus, Tony whipped one up on the lathe in his garage. Hands up those who can remember to use a lathe (safely).
That's the guy !
fantastic thing the Colossus and complete respect to the people like Tony who are dedicating a lot of time to getting an example running again. This is helped greatly by using bits robbed from decommissioned Telephone exchanges (the originals were built using the same technology)
But considering that most of the documentation was destroyed the fact that these guys have made so much progress is astounding.
Another interesting thing is that due to Colossus's parallel nature, even a fairly top end Desktop PC can only crack the codes 5 times faster...Ok it's a bit on an unfair comparison because Colossus is a single purpose device...and uses 5KW and a large room to do it...but it's still pretty impressive.