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THE VIDEO SHELF · history of computing

Colossus - The Greatest Secret in the History of Computing

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters recommend it as an excellent deep dive on the real Colossus, full of stories about unsung engineers.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
The Centre for Computing History
Topic
history of computing
Format
lecture
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
3
Recommendation years in dataset
2022–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool …

    jazzyjackson on Hacker News · 2022-03
    In Psychological Operations

  • I forget the details, but I recall this video on the Colossus- a very secretive program that resulted in arguably the first programmable digital computer (iirc). I think we only relatively recently learned of it's existence? [VIDEO] It was very worth the watch, lots of …

    hoten on Hacker News · 2024-05
    In ENIAC Simulator

  • a nice video on the real thing by the inimitable Professor Brailsford. [LINK] And a longer, deeper dive (also very good). [VIDEO]

    jgalt212 on Hacker News · 2024-04
    In Virtual Colossus

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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