Colossus strides the roads again

Thursday, November 15. 2007

Colossus strides the roads again

For those interested in the history of IT, this article is excellent - Colossus, the British World War 2 code cracking system, is being rebuilt for action.

Sez the Beeb:

The Colossus machine will be pitted against modern computer technology that will also be used to decipher and read the transmitted messages.

Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes.

"A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does," he said.

It was so fast, he said, because it was a single purpose processor rather than one put to many general purposes like modern desktop computers.

Maybe they can set it up as a Web 2.0 service for DRM crackers

Posted by Alan Patrick in Hackers and Startups at 13:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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