The decoding machine in the World works again

The giant computer named Colossus used by England to detect the message in secret orders of Germany in World War II was restored after 60 years of silence.

At the British Bletchley Park intelligence headquarters, the devices as big as trucks were repaired. This process took 14 years for scientists and they had to rely on some old photos.

During his days of operation, it took several hours to decipher a mysterious message encoded by the supreme leader's Lorenz SZ40 / 42 on the German side, often a plan for military deployment. Engineers are also not sure if the old-fashioned processing techniques are faster now. They said a virtual Colossus is currently developed to run on laptops using Pentium II with the same processing speed as the real Colossus. This relatively fast speed is achieved because the processor is only for a single target, unlike today's multitasking computer.

The operation process is as follows : Transmission signals from Lorenz SZ40 / 42 via radio are captured and printed on paper tape and fed into Colossus at a speed of 5,000 characters / sec. Colossus then analyzed the data to see how the wheels of Lorenz SZ40 / 42 worked to stamp out the encoded text. This message is analyzed many times and the final result will be printed on paper. Normally Colossus took 6 hours to understand the content of the message and trace the working structure of the Lorenz SZ40 / 42 wheel.

The decoding system around Colossus includes paper tapes, paper tape readers, phone jacks, program control buttons . (Photo: BBC)

Viet Toan