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Colossus Mark I
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see Banburismus) contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. (Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.) The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Forbin Project
''Colossus: The Forbin Project'' (also known as ''The Forbin Project'') is a 1970 American science fiction thriller film from Universal Pictures, produced by Stanley Chase, directed by Joseph Sargent, that stars Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, and William Schallert. Based upon the 1966 science fiction novel ''Colossus'' by Dennis Feltham Jones. The film, about an advanced American defense system, named Colossus, becoming sentient. After being handed full control, Colossus' draconian logic expands on its original nuclear defense directives to assume total control of the world and end all warfare for the good of humankind, despite its creators' orders to stop. Plot Dr. Charles A. Forbin is the chief designer of a secret project, "Colossus", an advanced supercomputer built to control the United States and Allied nuclear weapon systems. Located deep within a mountain and powered by its own nuclear reactor, Colossus is impervious to any attack. After Colossus is fully ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boolean Algebra (logic)
In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variable (mathematics), variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas in elementary algebra the values of the variables are numbers. Second, Boolean algebra uses Logical connective, logical operators such as Logical conjunction, conjunction (''and'') denoted as ∧, Logical disjunction, disjunction (''or'') denoted as ∨, and the negation (''not'') denoted as ¬. Elementary algebra, on the other hand, uses arithmetic operators such as addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. So Boolean algebra is a formal way of describing logical operations, in the same way that elementary algebra describes numerical operations. Boolean algebra was introduced by George Boole in his first book ''The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'' (1847), and set forth more fully in his ''The Laws of Thought, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time (magazine)
''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published Weekly newspaper, weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on March 3, 1923, and for many years it was run by its influential co-founder, Henry Luce. A European edition (''Time Europe'', formerly known as ''Time Atlantic'') is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa, and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition (''Time Asia'') is based in Hong Kong. The South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney. Since 2018, ''Time'' has been published by Time USA, LLC, owned by Marc Benioff, who acquired it from Meredith Corporation. History ''Time'' has been based in New York City since its first issue published on March 3, 1923, by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce. It was the first weekly news magazine in the United St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cryptanalysis Of The Enigma
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename '' Ultra''. The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the plugboard Enigma machine unbreakable. However, most of the German military forces, secret services, and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor operating procedures, and it was these poor procedures that allowed the Enigma machines to be reverse-engineered and the ciphers to be read. The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany's principal crypto-system. In December 1932 it was "broken" by mathematician Marian Rejewski at the Polish G ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Banburismus
Banburismus was a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in Britain during the Second World War. It was used by Bletchley Park's Hut 8 to help break German ''Kriegsmarine'' (naval) messages enciphered on Enigma machines. The process used sequential conditional probability to infer information about the likely settings of the Enigma machine. It gave rise to Turing's invention of the '' ban'' as a measure of the weight of evidence in favour of a hypothesis. This concept was later applied in Turingery and all the other methods used for breaking the Lorenz cipher. Overview The aim of Banburismus was to reduce the time required of the electromechanical Bombe machines by identifying the most likely right-hand and middle wheels of the Enigma. Hut 8 performed the procedure continuously for two years, stopping only in 1943 when sufficient bombe time became readily available. Banburismus was a development of the " clock method" invented by the Polish cryptanalyst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathemati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name. During World War II, the estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powersmost importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The GC&CS team of codebreakers included Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Bill Tutte, and Stuart Milner-Barry. The nature of the work at Bletchley remained secret until many years after the war. According to the official historian of British Intelligence, the "Ultra" intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and without it th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Government Communications Headquarters
Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primarily based at "The Doughnut" in the suburbs of Cheltenham, GCHQ is the responsibility of the country's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Foreign Secretary), but it is not a part of the Foreign Office and its Director ranks as a Permanent Secretary. GCHQ was originally established after the First World War as the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and was known under that name until 1946. During the Second World War it was located at Bletchley Park, where it was responsible for breaking the German Enigma codes. There are two main components of the GCHQ, the Composite Signals Organisation (CSO), which is responsible for gathering information, and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Newman
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby. Education and early life Newman was born Maxwell Herman Alexander Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, to a Jewish family, on 7 February 1897. His father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg (now in Poland), who had emigrated with his family to London at the age of 15.William Newman, "Max Newman – Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer", pp. 176–188 in Herman worked as a secretary in a company, and married Sarah Ann Pike, an Irish schoolteacher, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
General Post Office
The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Before the Acts of Union 1707, it was the postal system of the Kingdom of England, established by Charles II in 1660. Similar General Post Offices were established across the British Empire. In 1969 the GPO was abolished and the assets transferred to The Post Office, changing it from a Department of State to a statutory corporation. In 1980, the telecommunications and postal sides were split prior to British Telecommunications' conversion into a totally separate publicly owned corporation the following year as a result of the British Telecommunications Act 1981. For the more recent history of the postal system in the United Kingdom, see the articles Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd. Originally, the GPO was a state monopoly covering the dispatch of items from a specific sender to a specific receiver, which was to be of great importance when new forms of co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stored-program Computer
A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms. The definition is often extended with the requirement that the treatment of programs and data in memory be interchangeable or uniform. Description In principle, stored-program computers have been designed with various architectural characteristics. A computer with a von Neumann architecture stores program data and instruction data in the same memory, while a computer with a Harvard architecture has separate memories for storing program and data. However, the term ''stored-program computer'' is sometimes used as a synonym for the von Neumann architecture. Jack Copeland considers that it is "historically inappropriate, to refer to electronic stored-program digital computers as 'von Neumann machines'". Hennessy and Patterson wrote that the early Harvard m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
