In the footsteps of Colossus: a description of Oedipus

Author

Lavington, Simon

Author_Institution

Essex Univ., Colchester, UK

Volume

28

Issue

2

fYear

2006

Firstpage

44

Lastpage

55

Abstract

A number of cryptanalysis projects were developed in the UK during the postwar years 1945-1955. One of the most significant of these was Oedipus, a special-purpose rapid analytical machine using novel digital storage. Oedipus was developed by GCHQ and the UK companies Elliott and Ferranti. Oedipus contained a large semiconductor associative memory, a magnetic drum with on-the-fly searching, and a high-speed RAM cache. Its history has only recently been made publicly available.

Keywords

cache storage; content-addressable storage; history; magnetic storage; random-access storage; semiconductor storage; special purpose computers; Colossus; Elliott UK company; Ferranti UK company; GCHQ; Oedipus special-purpose rapid analytical machine history; cryptanalysis projects; digital storage; high-speed RAM cache; magnetic drum; semiconductor associative memory; Associative memory; Design engineering; Electronic equipment; Hardware; History; Large-scale systems; Magnetic analysis; Magnetic semiconductors; Military computing; Read-write memory; Bletchley Park; Colossus; Digital storage; Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd.; Ferranti Ltd.; GCHQ; Oedipus; associative memory; code-breaking; rapid analytical machine;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1058-6180

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MAHC.2006.34

Filename

1631914