Essay: Boolean Calculations

Sample Essay

It took eleven months for Tommy Flowers to design and build the colossus computers in the research station in London. After the procedure of the testing of the machine, this machine was sent to Bletchley Park and processed the first message for the first time on 18^th January 1944. After the Colossus Mark 1 there were further Colossi which were used by the end of the Second World War. The evident difference between the Mark 1 and Mark 2 was that there were 1,500 electronic valves in the Mark 1 and 2,500 electronic valves in the Mark 2. The greater amount of the electronic valves in the Mark 2 was the reason behind the fast speed of the Mark 2 (Reed 2007).

Colossus computers were efficient because these machines were the first to use shift registers and counters. These computers were built and designed in the most efficient way that they could easily perform the Boolean calculations. These machines were made programmable for the military use by switches and plug panels. Colossus computers could store the Lorenz setting and perform calculations to crack the codes. The best feature of the colossus computers was that these computers were capable to perform the calculations at higher rate. A paper tape was read by the tape system in these computers as these were synchronized with these tapes. The purposes of these are to limit the speed of these machines. These tape readers were capable to give high speed performance and could read 9700 characters per second. Just for the tentative measures, these readers were limited to read only 5,000 characters only which were quite better for the usage.

These computers were successful in meeting the requirement as these computers successfully cracked a great number of encrypted messages of the Germans. After the war these computers were destroyed for the security reasons except two of these computers. These two computers were sent from the Bletchley Park because right after the war Bletchley Park was closed. Colossus computer was kept as a secret from the world and that is why not many people knew about it and it was not given the credits because of the quality of being the first digital computer. Colossus computers were not even added to the history of the computing hardware because of the reason of its secrecy. Later on the secret was revealed by the authorities and the designers and engineers of the colossus computer were given the credits of their flawless work of that time (Knowledge Crush 2003).

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