More Secrets from the U.K. Revealed
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
You would think that after all these years we would know pretty much the whole story of British code-breaking computers during World War II, but we don’t. Here is a link to a BBC series, in which Simon Lavington discusses “Oedipus”–a post-war proto-supercomputer, the details of which are only now beginning to emerge. See my earlier post on Sam Snyder; also my post on the British lead in computers and how they lost it to the U.S.
Lavington says that one of the unique features of the machine was its use of associative memory. This concept was apparently independently discovered at least three times, by the British, by IBM, and lesser-known, in 1943 by Konrad Zuse (who has a sketch of associative-memory addressing circuits in his autobiography, Chapter 5). I’ll bet Zuse was the first.
I understand the need for secrecy, but what if this remarkable technology had not been kept under wraps? Now, with Google, the genie is out of the bottle anyway.
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