| Forum Home | ||||
| PC World Chat | ||||
| Thread ID: 91331 | 2008-07-03 10:02:00 | Birth of the Computer | Scouse (83) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 684925 | 2008-07-03 10:02:00 | An interesting talk - about 15 minutes... www.ted.com |
Scouse (83) | ||
| 684926 | 2008-07-03 22:36:00 | I get the impression that he is trying to say that the Yanks made the first computers? The ENIAC was the Yanks first computer developed for military purposes during World War Two. It was developed by Army Ordinance to compute World War Two ballistic firing tables. The project was begun in 1943 but the first was not built until 1945. My information is that the Poms built the first programmable computer during WWII. It was called Colossus and was used to decode the German Enigma signals. It was housed in 10 rooms of a mansion at Bletchly Park near London. While decoding the Enigma signals was not impossible without a computer (the Polish were very clever and fast) it took only hours rather than days. The story goes that for many of the German generals it would have been quicker for them to ring Bletchly Park for their orders as the Poms often knew what was about to happen well before the men in the field. |
Roscoe (6288) | ||
| 684927 | 2008-07-03 23:11:00 | en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org |
Bantu (52) | ||
| 684928 | 2008-07-07 05:25:00 | Colossus was not used on Enigma . Enigma was decrypted on copies of the Enigma machine once the keys has been found with a combination of intuition, luck, and a lot of wheels spinning on the "bombes" which were used to test possible keys by brute force methods ;) Enigma's weakness was that it was extensively used, so there were many more operators to make mistakes . ;) Even so, it was a pretty good system when used corrrectly: the German Navy were better at using it than the land services . Colossus was needed for a much more secure mechanical (teleprinter based) encryption "Lorenz" used by the Germans for their highest level communications . Of course the US claimed to be first: their one was never used in WW2; it wasn't finished in time . The British secrecy about their codebreaking activities was almost absolute until about 1970, so other "histories" have become established . Konrad Zuse is almost forgotten . . . he was a German who had electronic computers operating before and during WW2; the government didn't want to know . :( |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 1 | |||||