"Churchill ordered each of the machines to be disassembled after the war in order to keep their design secret."

Good job virtually all the Nazi leaders were even more stupid.

As well as using a modern computer and a modern computer language, he intercepted the message before the challenge was due to start.

This is a bit like getting an award for winning a race in a Ferrari against a guy with a horse and cart, and having a head start!

I'm still puzzled why people like him, he took decisions at work which resulted in the deaths of 50,000,000 people. Most managers wouldn't get away with killing one person at work.

If only he'd have let people into the inner workings of the ZX Spectrum, think how he could have advanced the state of the art of computer design... Jet Set Willy could have been one of the Office Assistants! All our keyboards would have had six separate functions on them!! No-one would have to use a programming language with function calls, since there would be no keys with those function names!!! Oh, the loss to humanity by keeping these things secret...

A valve as a prize!! I'd have hoped for a job offer from some big gov or security firm!

If anyone reading this hasn't been to BP, I can highly recommend it. Don't be put off by the mandatory 2-hour tour, you'll happily spend an entire afternoon there, even if you're not an IT geek! Colossus is far from being the only interesting exhibit.

It was interesting to see folks working on Colossus, while on the service benches around them were thermionic valves lying between laptops :)

Churchill was quite devious. Most of the Colossi were dismantled, but two were transferred to the newly formed GCHQ. Ultra was kept deliberately secret after the war, so that no-one would realise that ENIGMA had been broken, and therefore people would continue to use it. And they did. In fact, the allies deliberately encouraged the sale of ENIGMA to developing countries. Moreover, even where ENIGMA was not in use, ignorance of the advanced cryptanalysis techniques and technology that had been developed during the war held back the development of more advanced cryptosystems for some years - ENIGMA was supposedly still secure, so why bother with anything significantly more sophisticated?

Churchill' s secrecy was still yielding results twenty years after the war ended.

...for the americans to bring out a movie about this.

No doubt they will have cracked the code the first time and this time....

Doubt it would have made much difference. Lets say he was 100 miles away, and BP is 400 miles away, a difference of 300 miles.

300miles is 482803.2 metres, radiowaves travel at the speed of light (3x10^8m/s)

time is distance over speed

482803.2m / 300000000ms = 0.001609344s

so he would have had a 161µs advantage.

Paris cos she likes maths, like adding up the number of guys in her address book.

The guy didn't do badly on a bottle of brandy a day and a couple of those humungous cigars.

Is that my coat??

"A valve as a prize!! I'd have hoped for a job offer from some big gov or security firm!"

If he was hoping for, and got, such a job, do you seriously think it would have been announced publicly? Covert services don't tend to announce new hires in the Times. (Well, apart from 'C', anyway.)

In any case, the fact he wrote his solver in ADA might clue you in to the direction his thoughts were taking him.

... to start a campaign to fill the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square with a statue of Alan Turing because:

a) If any one person might be considered to shorten WW II, it is possibly he

b) Can anyone who made such a contribution have ever been treated as shoddily by bastards proporting to be agents of the state? This particularly winds me up a treat!

c) To make a major point against b)

d) A hearty Fuck Off against people "only following orders"

e) It's the right thing to do.

"The laptop was only 280 times faster"

Presumably it was running Windows Vista - all the overhead y'know...

I don't think much of his efforts to be honest!

if Moores laws (doubling of computational power every 18 month) were to hold true He should have cracked the code within 1nS of recipt of the message!

Just porting the Colossus platform to the latest and greatest machine should have resulted in the code being broaken within 46 seconds way back in 1954..... back when Breaking Enigma code was still being done in Cheltnham :-)

but mistaken.

The UK Gov has always tended towards official secrets, with the result that innovation is slow. Whilst although the US are also not exactly super public about their black ops, their greater historical dependence upon external contractors has moved most of the technology out into private ownership faster, with the result that despite having less raw intellectual know how after WWII they are the country that now leads in most areas technologically. Whereas we in the UK have been told by our 'leaders' that we are no longer a serious world power so often that most of us believe it.

Well at least the current bunch are focussed on courageous leadership and conviction politics, no cynical coat lining going on there.

And Kwac; U-571? You know full well that was Enigma Lite. outside now. With your coat. :)

Hmmm. Guess a distance to the nearest 100 miles then convert this to the nearest 10cm. Paris Hilton would be proud of your mathematical abilities.

Not a single "Boffin" reference on the whole page. What has become of the Reg?

You might have trouble breaking something up into an infinite number of parts. Lots, yes, infinite, no.

Nexox Enigma,

didn't you hear that China's first CPU had six million crystal tubes?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/09/30/six_million_crystal_tubes/

Was it a diode, triode, ... pentode or other?

He should now be arrested, for being in possession of "hacker tools". Do not pass start, do not collect $200, go directly to jail. Brilliant laws, aren't they?

//Svein

It's not an acronym, it's "Ada" (as in Lovelace, fnar fnar)

...program stuff like this in ANSI C (with inline ASM).

Orders of magnitude faster.

me thinks plane crash.....

I like the bit (missed from this report ) about another team had "Virtual Colussus" running on a laptop also.

And Joachim Schüth used a 1.4Mhz laptop with NetBSD.

Penguin power !