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Is Colossus out of date?



You may recall recent comments by Attorney General Janet Reno where
she notes that exportable encryption cannot be broken in reasonable
time by modern supercomputers.

With that as background, you may find the following paragraph interesting.
It is from  the Financial Times article on Colossus.
	http://jya.com/coloss.txt

>   [Tony] Sale describes [Colossus] as a large electronic valve
>   programmable logic calculator. "No lay person would argue
>   that it is not a computer," he says. Furthermore, because
>   it wasted no time retrieving a stored program it was almost
>   as fast as a high-speed modern computer whose nominal
>   work-rate is 1,000 times quicker. A simulation of Colossus
>   which Sale ran on a top-of-the-range Pentium PC took twice
>   as long as the real thing.

Martin Minow
[email protected]