We’ve all heard that early computers took up a whole room, but there are very few remaining examples of these gigantic beasts, and even fewer that are still working that you can go see.
Colossus is one such example, this machine was originally built in 1943 to break German cipher codes and was painstakingly restored to operation over a 15 year period starting in 1993.
To celebrate the achievement, the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park UK where Colossus resides held a contest pitting amateur radio codebreakers worldwide against Colossus, to break a set of period-authentic encrypted messages transmitted by shortwave radio from the Heinz Nixdorf museum in Paderborn, Germany.
The winner was a hobbyist with a specialized program running on a 1.2Ghz laptop, who was able to crack the code in less than a minute, 240 times faster than what Colossus was capable of.
He noted however that if you do the math, Colossus would compare to a similar modern processor running at 5.8Mhz, which is a remarkable amount of computing power for a 1944 computer, albeit one only capable of running very specialized programs.
