Frist Computer #shorts #randomfacts

#FristComputer #ComputerinUK #Tech During World War II the British intercepted two very different types of encrypted German military transmissions: Enigma, broadcast in Morse code, and then from 1941 the less-well-known “Fish” transmissions, based on electric teleprinter technology. The most important source of Fish messages was a German cipher machine that the British code-named “Tunny.” Tunny was the Schlüsselzusatz (SZ) cipher attachment, manufactured by Berlin engineering company C. Lorenz AG. Tunny sent its messages in binary code—packets of zeroes and ones resembling the binary code used inside present-day computer Computers and Technology Quiz Computers host websites composed of HTML and send text messages as simple as...LOL. Hack into this quiz and let some technology tally your score and reveal the contents to you. Tunny encrypted top-level messages from Hitler and his army high command in Berlin. The messages went by radio to the field marshals and generals fighting at the battlefronts in Europe and North Africa. After a lengthy struggle, British code breakers broke the new cipher in 1942, and it was soon realized that Tunny rivaled, or even exceeded, Enigma in importance. Colossus was built to carry out a fundamental stage of the Tunny code-breaking process—at electronic speed. How Tunny worked The Tunny machine, operating in conjunction with a teleprinter, would encrypt whatever German message was typed at the teleprinter keyboard. The teleprinter itself changed each keyboard letter or character into 5-bit teleprinter code, much as a modern computer keyboard converts typed letters into binary code. For example, A was transformed into 11000 and B into 10011. The Tunny machine then masked the message’s teleprinter-coded letters by blending them with other letters, also reduced to teleprinter code. The blending process produced what looked like random jumbles of letters. In January 1942, seven months after Tunny transmissions were first picked up, Bletchley Park code breaker William Tutte managed to unmask systematic patterns in the messages. He deduced that the masking letters, called “key,” were produced inside the Tunny machine by a system of 12 different wheels. Key was blended with the teleprinter-coded letters of the original German message by the Tunny machine’s electrical circuits. For example, blending A and B together always produced the same scrambled pattern 01011, the teleprinter code for G. Breaking the messages The crux to decrypting a message was discovering the letters of key that the machine had used to encrypt it. Tunny messages were soon being broken by hand, using a method invented by mathematician Alan Turing for deducing the letters of key. Turing’s method was the code breakers’ only weapon against Tunny for many months, but hand breaking proved too slow to keep up with the increasing flood of encrypted messages, especially in the face of German enhancements to the security of the system. It became clear that high-speed analytic machines were required. Colossus I, built at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, London, was delivered to Bletchley Park by a Post Office motortruck in January 1944—a pivotal, if secret, moment in the history of computers. Colossus I took nearly a year to build, but production then accelerated rapidly, with the Post Office’s factory in Birmingham manufacturing the later Mark II Colossi. These giant electronic computers were housed and operated in a special Tunny-breaking unit called the “Newmanry,” after its founder and leader, mathematician Max Newman.