Colossus and the Cops

Plain and simple? If it weren’t for current technology, I wouldn’t have a job.

But how it transformed my job, well, let’s bounce back in time and look at my former profession. The profession of Law Enforcement. Now this is a true case. And like some cases it got very involved. There were a lot of things going on. And so many things made it difficult for us to sort out what was going on.

That’s where the computer came in, or Colossus as we called the tiny machine.

The Learning Curve-

I first started playing with computers back in High School. Doesn’t sound like a big deal today. But when I started playing with them, men hadn’t walked on the moon yet. A computer in a school at the time was a pipe dream.

So, I harnessed a skill that would be invaluable to me in my life. Dr. Lynn Weldon, one of my college profs would one day tell me the secret to learning. He said, “Education shouldn’t teach you the answers. Chances are, by the time I teach you something, it’s obsolete already. What education should do is teach you to ask the right questions, and then find the answers.”

The man hadn’t even entered my life yet and I was already tapping into that wisdom. I realized I had a superpower in me. The power to ask questions, find answers, and figure things out.

We had exactly two books in the library on computers. I wish I could recall the titles, but one was rather thick book. It talked about where computers came from. It included things like Babbage’s Computing Machines, ENIAC, and other systems. It also dove into how we talked to these machines (punch cards, keyboards, and so on). It talked about storage. Things like tape. And it talked about hard drives that held a whooping 5 MBs and required a dolly to wheel them around.

The other book was thinner, and it was aimed more at the hobbyist. It told me how to build both Analog and Digital Computers. None of them were difficult but at the end of it, I had a real computer. I thought it through, and using the skills I’d learned I built a machine that played Tic-Tac-Toe. It wasn’t all that impressive, but it was a real gaming computer.

To actually work on a computer had to wait for college. I took COBOL and FORTRAN classes. These gave us access to the computer lab. Well, actually, it allowed us to write up our programs on punch cards. We then handed them to the System Administrator. Some of you might recall those days. The Admin was behind glass in a room slightly above freezing. And you gave them your paltry cards as if offering them to a priest. They then fed them into the machine.

The classes were fun, but no biggie.

The next time I played with a computer was in the eighties. Radio Shack had introduced the TS-1000. It was a box about the size of a hard cover novel. It had a keyboard and a couple of plugins. Aside from power, one of the plugins was for a shift switch. This allowed you to use your television as a monitor. It came with a book and some basic programs to write. And you could plug it into a cassette recorder and use that to save or load programs from.

I was already starting to see where they system could go. But to pursue it on my own involved money I didn’t have.

An Investigative tool-

Flash forward to Ft. Riley Military Police Investigations. This is where I started really harnessing the power of the computer. We had one computer in the office, and it was an old IBM machine. All anyone ever used it for was to play Police Quest on it.

Someone else in the office was a Sci-Fi buff and had put a name tag on the machine. They named it Colossus. I was familiar with the Forbin Project where the name came from, and I chuckled. This machine was a far cry from the supercomputer in those books.

The machine was about to go from plaything to serious investigative aid. There was so much data to look at, humans couldn’t do it. The machine is perfect for that.

What was going on was we were experiencing a rash of stereo thefts from cars. Ft. Riley was an open post at the time, and we were pretty sure someone was coming in from off post. They were breaking into cars and stealing the high-end systems. In a month’s time, something like a hundred thousand dollars in car stereos had been stolen.

And it was getting us some unwanted attention from the Commanding General.

He wanted to know what we were doing about it.

We were doing everything we could.

This included walking the parking lots at night. Going into the bars and talking to everyone how might know something. I spent hours at the local PDs checking thousands of pawn shop tickets. We even employed some of the Army’s high end surveillance helicopters to watch over things.

And we came up with nothing.

Christ, we came up with less than nothing.

This went on for weeks!

And we didn’t have a clue what to do about it.!

Next – Colossus and the Crooks – Stay tuned

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