Why PC, but not ... World War II supercomputer
On Friday, the British National Museum of Computing arranged the most interesting comparative test of computers in recent years. In the estate of Blechley Park not far from London, where the top secret cryptographic center “Station X” was located during the War, deciphering German military correspondence, they agreed to resist youth and mature power: the usual desktop PC and the supercomputer legend Colossus Mark II, which was restored according to original drawings for the 60th anniversary of the museum in 2004.
On Thursday, the powerful radio transmitter of Heinz Nixdorf’s largest computer museum in the German Padeborne shook the evening sky with a signal carrying a message encrypted by the Lorenz SZ42 machine, which the Nazi command used to encode messages of the highest level of secrecy. This was the start of the Cipher Challenge competition, during which the revived Colossus earned for the first time in more than 60 years that have passed since all its counterparts were destroyed by the personal order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Thus, he wanted to protect the country from the threat of the ingenious invention of its engineers against her.
While on the other side of the English Channel, the Blechley Park lab struggled with a weak signal level, and then put the resulting digital code on punch cards with difficulty, amateur cryptographers across Europe also downloaded their modern desktop PCs with work.
By 9 am on Friday, Colossus was already working at full capacity, processing the most difficult part of the test task. At 13:15, he was the first to finish deciphering it, 45 minutes ahead of the nearest competitor! But here the evil rock played its role: the blown-out lamp put the car out of operation, and by the time it was replaced it was too late ...
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Having overtaken Colossus "on the turn", Joachim Scheut, a Bonn programmer who wrote a special program focused on solving the problems of the competition, took the lead. He ended up the winner. However, he did not begin to boast of such a strangely symbolic victory of Germany and gave due to the huge contribution of cryptographers from Blechley Park to the struggle against the fascists on the Western Front, which brought the fall of Nazism in the country closer.
On Thursday, the powerful radio transmitter of Heinz Nixdorf’s largest computer museum in the German Padeborne shook the evening sky with a signal carrying a message encrypted by the Lorenz SZ42 machine, which the Nazi command used to encode messages of the highest level of secrecy. This was the start of the Cipher Challenge competition, during which the revived Colossus earned for the first time in more than 60 years that have passed since all its counterparts were destroyed by the personal order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Thus, he wanted to protect the country from the threat of the ingenious invention of its engineers against her.
While on the other side of the English Channel, the Blechley Park lab struggled with a weak signal level, and then put the resulting digital code on punch cards with difficulty, amateur cryptographers across Europe also downloaded their modern desktop PCs with work.
By 9 am on Friday, Colossus was already working at full capacity, processing the most difficult part of the test task. At 13:15, he was the first to finish deciphering it, 45 minutes ahead of the nearest competitor! But here the evil rock played its role: the blown-out lamp put the car out of operation, and by the time it was replaced it was too late ...
')
Having overtaken Colossus "on the turn", Joachim Scheut, a Bonn programmer who wrote a special program focused on solving the problems of the competition, took the lead. He ended up the winner. However, he did not begin to boast of such a strangely symbolic victory of Germany and gave due to the huge contribution of cryptographers from Blechley Park to the struggle against the fascists on the Western Front, which brought the fall of Nazism in the country closer.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/16416/
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