dewhitton

what's scary is that i actually understand that thing...

What, you mean the paper tape? I used to work with that stuff when I was in the Navy. Lovely stuff! The chads make excellent confetti. I have an icon that I like to use when someone is being a prat, so it's certainly not directed at you? I just thought you might find it amusing...

This is the voice of Colossus...

Except that this "Colossus" has somewhat less computing power than my $12 drugstore wristwatch :-)

My favourite fact about Colossus is that you can measure its clock speed in miles per hour :)

Flower's mentions the interesting things that happen to the paper tape at 60MPH :D

Great stuff!

I think I saw that behind Spock's station.

Was it programmed to receive?

I don't know.

I haf to mejk a stänt herre: Z1 and Z3. ;-) Not that they were put to much use, unlike Colossus.

First *real* job was at GTE California (now Verizon West) doing Central Office Installer work on Strowger Step telephone switching - and the vintage gear looked a LOT like that. And was surprisingly reliable if you kept it lubed and adjusted. We had to keep adding new lines and doing customer changes until it could be replaced with electronics.

Colossus is an interesting machine, looks like they were simply doing Brute Force decoding of the encrypted traffic - Put the coded message on that paper tape loop in the repeater, and step through all the possible decode solutions till real words started appearing - all valid letter and symbol codes, no trash.

Nowadays a desktop computer can probably crack an Enigma coded message in mere seconds, but in WW-II that was state of the art.