1943 AD |
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| During World War II, Alan Turing (inventor of the Turing Machine) worked as a cryptographer, decoding codes and ciphers at one of the British government's top-secret establishments located at Bletchley Park. | ||
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| During
this time, Turing was a key player in
the breaking of the German's now-famous ENIGMA
Code. However, in addition to
ENIGMA, the Germans had another cipher that was employed for their ultra-top-secret
communications. This cipher, which was vastly more complicated that ENIGMA, was generated by a machine called a Geheimfernschreiber (secret telegraph), which the allies referred to as the "Fish." |
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| In January 1943, along with a number of colleagues, Turing began to construct an electronic machine to decode the Geheimfernschreiber cipher. This machine, which they dubbed COLOSSUS, comprised 1,800 vacuum tubes and was completed and working by December of the same year! | ||
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| By any standards COLOSSUS was one of the world's earliest working programmable electronic digital computers. But it was a special-purpose machine that was really only suited to a narrow range of tasks (for example, it was not capable of performing decimal multiplications). Having said this, although COLOSSUS was built as a special-purpose computer, it did prove flexible enough to be programmed to execute a variety of different routines. | ||
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| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
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