NYT: A Colossus Mistake

In H Block at Bletchley Park, the historic code-breaking facility 50 miles from London, visitors can view a rebuilt working model of a Colossus, one of the first electronic digital computers, built during World War II to decrypt Nazi codes. If only they hadn’t waited 60 years to put it back together — there might still be a British Empire. And Silicon Valley might be in some bog outside of Bletchley Park.

During World War II, there were two major Allied efforts — one British and one American — to build electronic computers. The United States needed artillery-firing tables for their big-gun battleships. Until then, the word “computers” referred to people, mostly young women, who slowly fed error-filled information into number crunching machines. One such operation, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, was used to solve differential equations involving speed, wind, distance, etc., to improve accuracy. Over at the University of Pennsylvania, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, with help from the U.S. Army, were working on the design of the ENIAC, an electronic and programmable computer, to help automate and speed that task, and fire those human computers. The contract to build it was signed in 1943, but it was still being developed as the war dragged on. In the meantime, most artillery shells fired during the war simply missed.

The British had more pressing needs. They knew the Nazis were sending messages to troops and to U-boat submarines in code, using a code generating machine called Enigma. The Enigma had actually been used by Germany and other European countries since the 1920s. The Poles developed a model that successfully cracked the Enigma code in 1932. But by 1939, the Nazi’s had learned to change the critical key every day instead of every month. As Poland fell, the Poles smuggled their model, known as the Bomba, to the British, who set up a top-secret effort, ULTRA, at Hut 8 in Bletchley Park to decrypt the Enigma messages. Even with the help of the Polish Bomba it would take several days by hand to determine each day’s key.

Alan Turing, who conceptualized programmable computers at Princeton, was brought to Bletchley Park to design a machine called the Bombe out of electromechanical relays to automate this decryption task. Bombe was delivered in March of 1940 and by December of 1944, there were 192 Bombe machines, more calculator than computer, decrypting code. The Germans, by the way, also had a computer effort, led by Konrad Zuse, which was eventually destroyed by Allied bombing.

Hitler and his high command then developed a tougher code to communicate, named Lorenz (the Brits called it Tunny). An extra letter in its key made it much tougher to crack — it could take weeks to decipher the key instead of a day. In March of 1943, the brains at Hut 8 developed a programmable machine out of vacuum tubes to speed up breaking the Lorenz code. It was named Heath Robinson, after the British Rube Goldberg, as it was more of a contraption than a computer and didn’t help much.

Tommy Flowers and later Alan Coombs of, get this, the British Post Office, improved on the Robinson and by December of 1943, their aptly named room-sized Colossus computer was breaking the Lorenz code (or other codes as it was reprogrammable) in hours instead of weeks. The Colossus was the first real programmable computer; with 1500 vacuum tubes, it could read messages at 5000 characters per second and do 100 calculations at a time, all searching for patterns.

The Colossus played a crucial role in D-Day. By understanding where the Germans had the bulk of their troops, the Allies could decide which beaches to storm and what misinformation to spread to keep the landings a surprise.

The ENIAC, on the other hand, was no help in the shelling of German positions on D-Day. How do I know this? It wasn’t done yet. It wouldn’t be operational until February of 1946, fully two years after the British Colossus, and well after the war was over.

So why, one has to ask, is the computer industry so uniquely American? Why is the U.S. a superpower and the British lapdogs instead of bulldogs? At least in part, blame the Russians. Or British paranoia.

After VE day, the Cold War started immediately. The British were scared to death of Russian spies stealing the plans for the Colossus, of which 10 had been built. So they got rid of them. Yup, destroyed them — took an axe to the machines and lit a match to the plans. All the Bombes were destroyed, too. Can you believe it? Apparently, British Intelligence kept two Colossus machines for their own use (training Secret Agents 001 through 006, perhaps?). But these final two were destroyed the 1960s. It didn’t matter. Secrecy or paranoia, the general public didn’t learn about the Colossus machines until the 1970s. Now you know why there is no Sir Bill Gatesford, Duke of Bits.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the ENIAC was finally done and the War Department didn’t burn it. Instead, on February 16, 1946, it put out a press release and then held the first computer conference to explain how the ENIAC worked. Talk about open source! Every major corporation and university sent representatives, each of whom came back home and declared, “I gotta build me one of them things!”

And there you have it. The computer was born at Bletchley Park but the computer industry was born in the good old U.S. of A. Innovation ran rampant. In rapidly changing businesses, secrecy is not always the best policy. Silicon Valley popped up to supply cheap transistors for this uniquely domestic industry. Software grew. Today, companies make billions doing the same searches the Colossus “search engine” pioneered. The military even got their payback, eventually computer-guiding bombs via global positioning satellite coordinates instead of artillery firing tables. A trillion dollar press release!

Poor England. Technology today is a multi-trillion business dominated by American companies, thanks to simple British paranoia. Their century-long lead as an industrial power evaporated with nothing to replace it. A truly Colossus mistake! Let’s hope paranoia is not constraining the United States in the next wave of technology or potential wealth creation: offshoring, F.D.A. approvals, nuclear energy, stem cell research, bandwidth auctions, Area 51?

http://kessler.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/a-colossus-mistake/

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