Quote:
Originally Posted by sesame
Arithmetic and Logic, Anna.
And computers in those days and many years to come had very limited capabilities. Forget the complex dataprocessing and analyses and image processing and rendering and sound processing and simulation and interactivity & whatever you see nowadays.  |
Just remember, they landed on the moon with a 2mhz precessor and ~4k of RAM, you done anything more complex than that on your computer recently?
Colossus when scaled against a modern computer would have a clock speed of 5.8mhz and memory limited only by the amount of tape available.
Colossus was Turing complete. This means that it can perform the functions of a Turing machine, except not to an infinite degree. This means it can perform any algorithm given enough time and memory. In essence all Turing complete machines are non-infinite versions of a Turing machine, they simply differ in scale and speed. There is no operation that one cannot perform that another can given enough storage. Essentially if you had enough tape, good enough programming skill and a very long life span, you could apply the same image manipulations with colossus as you do with photoshop on your laptop. of course your image would be displayed as a very long binary number on a very long piece of paper. You would also have a very long beard.
But the point is, colossus is as valid a computer as your desktop, and capable of some incredibly sophisticated calculations.