Wayne Stallwood writes:
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)
That's because much of the design was due to Tommy Flowers, who worked for the post office research department. His contribution to early electronic computing is still not as widely recognized as it should be.
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.
You're entirely right. That's the difference in performance between what is in effect a dedicated piece of hardware and a general-purpose architecture. The nearest modern equivalent would be to implement Colossus on an FPGA, perhaps in Handel-C. Now there's an interesting idea for a final-year project...
..Adrian