Good evening,

Random question for you all this evening, Colossus 1, what was it's mhz speed compared with a machine today. Only thing I found was on Wiki which I don't overly trust but it said to have an equivalent speed of 5.8mhz.

So anyone got a definite answer?

Ta.,

I've had a look at 3 or 4 sites and they all say it's about the same, but I can't help but wondering... Since the Colossus 1 was a mechanical computer could you really do a "If it was a digital computer it would run at x MHz" comparison?

for a true comparison, youd have to measure its performance in either FLOPS(float operations per second) or IOPS (integer operations per second). whether or not what colossus worked in could be realistically described as either of these number formats is another matter. so chances are the best way of quantifying how much faster a modern computer is would be to have it do the same work as colossus, ie write a program which mimics colossus and breaks the enigma code. IIRC there is a website that does this, however i dont know what codebase its written in (HTML, Flash, C etc) so, its overall efficiency is probably questionable.

itd be interesting if someone could translate the Colossus into modern coding language for historical/benchmarking purposes, itd be a lot more interesting that SuperPI

Following on from John, seeing as Colossus was mechanical (and I'm not sure how it worked), couldn't you make it faster by upping the speed of the motor?

from wikipedia

apparently he wrote the code in ADA, i wonder if thats available for public use/compiling?

Presumably purely because of the history of the project, rather than performance. For a number of environments, though, Ada is translated into C, at least with a 2005 compiler.

<eddit>Reading the article again, it seems he also did signal processing, where as on a real collossus this was done by many many people, and collossus just did the decoding.