Monday, June 23, 2008

Colossus Returns!

Incredible slide show from the BBC about the fifteen-year effort to rebuild the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park.

5 comments:

  1. Oh, it's not bad enough having piles of smaller-than-a-room size computers laying around, they've got to rebuild a big one that's not as powerful as the computer inside a $2.00 digital calculator?
    Meh.

    Oh. Anyway. I popped in to tell you that though it's long overdue, I finally put you on my blogroll.

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  2. Super cool slide show. It's actually really neat.

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  3. Ahhhh, yeah. I met that a couple of months back, giving a talk at Bletchley. Whatt wonlly got me was the smell of it, that wonderful odour of hot bakelite and ozone.

    In terms of power, though, there's a Pentium II that's running a source-code emulation of Colossus II, and it goes at about the same speed. That's worth thinking on - them thar analogue 'puters don't do things the same way as your Dell or Mac.

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  4. I think my Flexowriter is a little newer than that one, but of a similar vintage.

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