Power of the Colossus

[Dave Britten]

(05-31-2015 03:54 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  Was reading on the colossus today that was used by the British during 2nd WW to decipher German messages. It is said that the colossus being parallel can compare with today PCs in terms of power. Not sure when the article was written but this seems today vastly overstated. The Colossus could manage 5000cps with concurrent 100 operations (probably one bit since these are valves) which is equivalent to 500KHz.
I was wondering if we would have had better results with a simple 50g :-)

Going in reverse, I'm always fascinated that my desktop computer at work probably has more computing power than the entire world had available just 40 years ago, and yet real work could still be done comfortably with just a humble HP 65 or 67. I think we've simply invented new data processing "needs" to justify having such an obscene amount of computational power.