Colossus - The Greatest Secret in the History of Computing
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as an excellent deep dive on the real Colossus, full of stories about unsung engineers.
What it is
Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jazzyjackson · 2022-03 · on “Psychological Operations”
To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful) OTOH, mass deception of a population is a little newer, and anytime Russian PSYOPS are brought up I like to drop this link [1] about US Army developing social media "sockpuppets" back in 2011, years before we ever heard of the Internet Research Agency (founded in 2013 if
Strong rec hoten · 2024-05 · on “ENIAC Simulator”
I forget the details, but I recall this video on the Colossus- a very secretive program that resulted in arguably the first programmable digital computer (iirc). I think we only relatively recently learned of it's existence? [this video] It was very worth the watch, lots of fascinating tidbits including some stories of unsung heroes / geniuses. It was kept secret even after WWII but the people involved went off to kickstart the computer industry in England
Recommends jgalt212 · 2024-04 · on “Virtual Colossus”
a nice video on the real thing by the inimitable Professor Brailsford. [LINK] And a longer, deeper dive (also very good). [this video]