Advances in I/O, Speedup, and Universality on Colossus, an Unconventional Computer

摘要

Colossus, the first electronic digital (and very unconventional) computer, was not a stored-program general purpose computer in the modern sense, although there are printed claims to the contrary. At least one of these asserts Colossus was a Turing machine. Certainly, an appropriate Turing machine can simulate the operation of Colossus. That is hardly an argument for generality of computation. But this is: a universal Turing machine could have been implemented on a clustering of the ten Colossus machines installed at Bietchley Park, England, by the end of WWII in 1945. Along with the presentation of this result, several improvements in input, output, and speed, within the hardware capability and specification of Colossus are discussed.