talks about the building Colossus
summary
Rebuild of Colossus begins in 1994 and the hardware blueprint enters the public domain in 2000; the machine uses thousands of valves, runs 24/7 with electromechanical soft starts, and the rebuilt panel matches wartime circuit design. It does statistical bit-pattern statistics counting rather than brute-force character attacks, shrinking an estimated 760,000 million years to 3-4 hours for the targeted problem, and is explicitly not a stored-program computer—configured by switches that wire gates for a single algorithm.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Colossus project introduction
- 0:47Origins of Colossus
- 1:53Rebuilding Colossus
- 3:22Hardware details of Colossus
- 4:48Breaking Lorenz cipher
- 6:57Colossus as specialized machine
- 8:49Valve computer maintenance
- 10:14Reliability and power
- 11:40Valve spares manufacturing
- 12:21Preservation vs modifications
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