Colossus computer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Colossus computer as it was during World War II

Colossus was the world's first programmable electronic digital computer.[1] British
codebreakers[2] used Colossus to help to read German coded radio messages during World
War II.

These messages were sent between the German High Command,[3] and Adolf Hitler's top
army commanders. Reading these messages helped the Allies to win the war.

Codebreaker Max Newman worked at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at
Bletchley Park. His problem was how to get a machine that would help turn German coded
radio teleprinter messages into ordinary language. A group of Post Office telephone
engineers led by Tommy Flowers worked out how to do this.[4] Their design, which was
called "Colossus" used many vacuum tubes (valves). The first machine, Mark 1, worked in
December 1943. It solved its first problem at Bletchley Park on 5 February 1944.[5] Colossus
Mark 2 was even better. It first worked on 1 June 1944, just before the Normandy Landings
on D-Day. Ten Colossus computers were in use at the end of the war.

British codebreakers called the teleprinter messages "Fish". The messages had been coded by
an unknown German machine. They called the machine and its coded messages "Tunny".[6]
Colossus imitated the machine and read the coded message from a punched tape. It tried
various possibilities of how two of the wheels had been set up. When Colossus found likely
settings for two wheels, the codebreaker designed further programs for Colossus until likely
settings of other wheels were found. Colossus did not perform all of the decoding process. It
just found likely settings of the machine. The output from Colossus was then worked on by
people who had a very good knowledge of the German language.
Wartime view of Colossus number ten.

It was not until the end of the war that the British codebreakers found out that the code
machine was the Lorenz SZ42.[7] After the war all the secret Colossus computers were taken
to pieces, so that no one would find out about them. The designs were destroyed. For thirty
years no one knew who made the first computers. Between the early 1990s and 2007, a
working copy of a Colossus computer was built. This can be seen at The National Museum of
Computing at Bletchley Park in England.

Contents
 1 Purpose and origins
 2 Building Colossus
 3 Design and use
 4 Influence and fate
 5 Making it again
 6 Other pages
 7 References
 8 Further reading
 9 Other websites

Purpose and origins

Regular radio transmissions of "Tunny" messages started in June 1941. The British
codebreakers saw that it used a five-unit code like a teleprinter system.[8] Their research also
showed that the coding was being done by a rotor cipher machine with 12 wheels (rotors).
For each new message sent, the wheels had first to be turned to different positions from
before. This position was called the start position for the message. It was chosen by the
operator who was sending the message. He told the operator who was receiving the message
what the start positions were with 12 letters that were not coded. The total number of possible
start positions of the 12 wheels was very large indeed.

The coding machine added together[9] the plaintext (the un-coded version of the message) and
a stream of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation) called the keystream (a stream of
seemingly random characters) that it generated to make the ciphertext (the coded version of
the message). The ciphertext, which made no sense, was transmitted by radio. At the
receiving end an identical machine removed the keystream to produce the plaintext of the
message.

If the German operators always worked correctly, no two messages would have the same start
position of the wheels. However, mistakes were made. They helped the British codebreakers.
On 30 August 1941 two versions of the same message, which was nearly 4,000 characters
long, were sent with the same wheel start positions.[10] This mistake was very useful to the
research codebreakers. A codebreaker called John Tiltman was able to get the keystream
from these messages.

The machine that was code named "Tunny" by the British. The Germans used it to code
secret teleprinter communications. It was not seen by the Allies until the end of WWII when
they learnt that it was the Lorenz SZ42. It had ten wheels each with a different number of
cams. There were a total of 501 cams each of which could be put into the raised (active)
position or the lowered (inactive) position.

The codebreakers tried to work out the details of the machine from this information, but at
first they failed. They were then joined by a young codebreaker called Bill Tutte who was
given the job. After a lot of work he succeeded, and produced a logical description of the
unseen machine. This work has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement of
world war II". [11] Tutte worked out that the machine made each keystream character by
combining the effects of two sets of five wheels. He used Greek letters to name the wheels.
He called one set of five the χ ("chi") wheels, and the other set of five the ψ ("psi") wheels.
He worked out that the χ wheels moved on one position for each new character coded. The ψ
wheels, however, did not move regularly. They only moved on some of the time. Whether or
not the ψ wheels moved on was controlled by two wheels that he called two the μ ("mu") or
"motor wheels".

Max Newman was a mathematician and codebreaker at Bletchley Park. He was given the job
of working out how a machine could break "Tunny" messages. The machine would do a
calculation for many possible start positions of the χ wheels. The start position that gave the
largest count from this calculation was likely to be the right one. The first machine was called
"Heath Robinson". This did not work very well. It had two punched paper tapes that had to
work exactly together. One tape contained the ciphertext in a continuous loop. The second
looped tape contained patterns made by the wheels of the coding machine. The tapes would
often stretch or break when going at 2000 characters each second. Sometimes the tapes would
not line up; then the counts were wrong.
Building Colossus
Tommy Flowers worked at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in north-west
London. He was asked to look at the Heath Robinson machine. He thought it was a weak
machine. He designed an electronic machine to do the same job. It would make the patterns
of the coding machine by electronics so that only one paper tape was needed. In February
1943 he showed Max Newman this design. The design needed 1,500 thermionic valves
(vacuum tubes). Few people thought that so many valves could work without a lot failing.
More Heath Robinson machines were ordered. Flowers, however, kept with the idea of an
electronic machine. He got support from the person in charge of the Post Office Research
Station who was called Gordon Radley. Tommy Flowers and his team started work on
Colossus in February 1943.

The tape with the message on it had to be read at speed. Tommy Flowers tested the tape
reader up to 9,700 letters/second (53 mph (85 km/h)) before the tape broke. He selected 5,000
characters each second as a good speed for regular work. This meant that the paper tape
moved at 40 ft/s (12 m/s) or 27.3 mph (43.9 km/h). The electronic circuits were driven by a
signal made from reading the sprocket holes of the punched tape.

The first Colossus worked at Dollis Hill in December 1943. Then they took Colossus apart
and moved it to Bletchley Park. It got there on 18 January 1944. Harry Fensom and Don
Horwood put it back together.[12] Colossus read its first message on the 5th of February.[13]
After the first Colossus (Mark 1) there were nine Mark 2 machines. These each had 2,400
valves. They were easier to use. They could be programmed to work at five times the speed
of the Mark 1. A Mark 2 Colossus first worked on 1 June 1944.

At first Colossus was only used to find the starting wheel places used for a message (called
wheel setting). Codebreakers worked out how to use the Mark 2 to help find the patterns of
the cams on the wheels (wheel breaking). At the end of the war there were ten Colossus
computers working at Bletchley Park. This meant that very many messages were decoded.

Design and use

The English used in this article or section may not be easy for everybody to
understand. You can help Wikipedia by reading Wikipedia:How to write Simple
English pages, then simplifying the article. (March 2012)

Colossus used electronics that were new back then. It used vacuum tubes (also called
thermionic valves), thyratrons and photomultipliers. It read a paper tape with light. It then
used a programmable logical function on every letter. It counted how often this function was
"true". Machines with many valves were known to break a lot. They break most when turning
on, so the Colossus machines were only turned off[13] when a part broke.

Colossus was the first of the electronic digital machines that could have a program. It could
not change as much as in later machines:[14]

 it had no program inside itself. A person used plugs, wires and switches to change the
program. This is how it was set it up for a new task.
  Colossus was not a general-purpose machine. It was designed for only one code
breaking task. That task was counting and Boolean operations.

It was not a general Turing-complete computer, even though Alan Turing was at Bletchley
Park. This idea had not yet been invented, and most of the other early modern computing
machines were not Turing-complete (for example: the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, the
Harvard Mark I electro-mechanical relay machine, the Bell Labs relay machines by George
Stibitz and others, or the first designs of Konrad Zuse). The idea of a computer as a general
purpose machine—that is, as more than a calculator only for the solution of one hard
problem—did not become common for many years.

Influence and fate

What the Colossus computers were used for was very secret. The Colossus itself was highly
secret even for many years after the War. This is why Colossus could not be included in the
history of computing hardware for a long time. Nobody knew how important that Flowers
and the other people who helped make it were.

Not many people knew about this secret computer, so it had little direct effect on the new
design of later computers; EDVAC was the early design which had the most effect on later
computer design.

Once Colossus was made, some people now knew that high-speed electronic (no moving
parts like electrical relays) digital computing devices could be made and they did not break
too much. Just this knowledge was enough to have a big effect on the designs of early
computers in Britain and probably in the US. People who knew about Colossus were
important in the early computer field in Britain. In 1972, Herman Goldstine wrote that:

Britain had such vitality (energy or drive) that it could right after the war start so many well-
planned and well-done projects in the computer field.[15]

In writing that, Goldstine did not know of Colossus. He did not know what it left to projects
of people who knew about it. People such as Alan Turing (with the Pilot ACE and ACE), and
Max Newman and I. J. Good (with the Manchester Mark 1 and other early Manchester
computers). Brian Randell later wrote that:

the COLOSSUS project was an important source of this vitality (energy or drive), one that
has not been well understood or known, as has the importance of its places in the time line of
the invention of the digital computer.[16]

Colossus plans and machinery were secret from the when they were made. They stayed so
after the War, when Winston Churchill ordered the destruction of most of the Colossus
machines into "parts no bigger than a man's hand"; Tommy Flowers himself burned the
designs in a fireplace at Dollis Hill. Some parts, changed to look innocent, were taken to
Newman's Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University.[17] The
Colossus Mark 1 was taken apart and the parts were sent back to the Post Office. Two
Colossus computers, along with two copied Tunny machines, were kept. They were moved to
GCHQ's new head office at Eastcote in April 1946. They moved again with GCHQ to
Cheltenham between 1952 and 1954.[18] One of the computers, known as Colossus Blue, was
taken apart in 1959; the other in 1960.[18] In their later years, the computers were used for
training. Before that, there had been attempts to change them (sometimes well) for other
purposes.[19] Jack Good was the first to use it after the war, getting NSA to use Colossus to do
something for which they were planning to build a special purpose machine.[18] Colossus was
also used to perform letter counts on one-time pad tape to test for non-randomness.[18]

At this time the Colossus was still secret, long after any of its technical details were of any
importance. This was due to the UK's intelligence agencies use of Enigma-like machines
which they got other governments to buy. The agencies then broke the codes using different
ways. Had the knowledge of the codebreaking machines been widely known, no one would
have accepted these machines; rather, they would have developed their own methods for
encryption, methods that the UK services might not have been able to break. The need for
such secrets slowly went away as communications moved to digital transmission and all-
digital encryption systems became common in the 1960s.

Colonel Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret came out in 1975.[20] This broke the secrecy
around the Colossus. After that, details about the computer began to become public in the late
1970s.

A 500-page technical report on the Tunny cipher and its code breaking – entitled General
Report on Tunny – was given by GCHQ to the national Public Record Office in October
2000; the complete technical report is online.[21]

Making it again

In 2006, Tony Sale (right) is in charge. They are breaking an enciphered message with the
completed machine. Since 1994 his team has been building a new Colossus computer at
Bletchley Park.

A team led by Tony Sale built a working copy[22] of a Colossus Mark 2. The plans and
machines had been destroyed, but a surprising amount of other material was not destroyed. It
was mostly in engineers' notebooks, much of it in the U.S. The optical tape reader might have
been the biggest problem, but Dr. Arnold Lynch, its designer, was able to redesign it from his
own first writings. The rebuilt Colossus is on show at The National Museum of Computing,
in H Block Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. This is where the Colossus
No. 9 was used in the war.

In November 2007, to mark both the end of the work and the start of fundraising (asking for
money) they ran a competition. The money would help The National Museum of Computing
with a Cipher Competition[23] where the rebuilt Colossus competed with radio amateurs all
around the world. The first to hear and decode three messages enciphered would win. They
would be enciphered using the Lorenz SZ42 and transmitted from the radio station in the
Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum computer museum in Germany. The competition was easily
won by radio amateur Joachim Schüth. Schüth had gotten ready[24] for the event. He made his
own signal processing and code-breaking program using Ada.[25] The Colossus team lost
because they wanted to use World War II radios,.[26] They were a day late because of bad
radio conditions. The winner's 1.4 GHz laptop, running his own program, took less than a
minute to find the settings for all 12 wheels. The German codebreaker said: "My laptop
worked on ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million letters per second—240x faster than Colossus.
If you compare the two computers, you could say Colossus had a speed of 5.8 MHz. That is
very fast for a computer built in 1944."[27]

Other pages
 ENIAC
 Supercomputer
 Enigma (machine)
 Lorenz Cipher

References
1.

 Copeland 2006, Copeland, Jack, Introduction p. 2.

  Codbreakers are people who work out how the meaning of some writing has been
hidden. If they succeed, the meaning can be found. Another name for codebreaker is
"cryptanalyst".
  German: Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW)
  Flowers 1983, p. 244.
  Copeland 2006, Copeland, Jack, Machine against Machine p. 75.
  Good, Michie & Timms 1945, 1 Introduction: 11 German Tunny, 11A Fish Machines,
(c) The German Ciphered Teleprinter, p. 4.
  Good 1993, pp. 162,163.
  Good, Michie & Timms 1945, 41 The First Break 41A Early Traffic Analysis (a) A first
analysis, p. 297.
  The type of addition was "modulo 2" which is the same as the Boolean Exclusive Or
(XOR) function.
  Good, Michie & Timms 1945, 41 The First Break 41C A Depth Read (b) The depth
"HQIBPEXEZMUG", p. 298.
  O'Connor, J J; Robertson, E F (2003), MacTutor Biography: William Thomas Tutte,
University of St Andrews, retrieved 28 April 2013
  The Colossus Rebuild http://www.tnmoc.org/colossus-rebuild.aspx
  Jack Copeland, "Machine against Machine", p. 75 (entire article pp. 64-77) in B. Jack
Copeland, ed., Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, Oxford
University Press, 2006
  A Brief History of Computing. Jack Copeland, June 2000
  The Computer from Pascal to von Neuman (pp. 321)
  B. Randell, "The Colossus", in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (N.
Metropolis, J. Howlett and G. C. Rota, Eds.), pp.47-92, Academic Press, New York, 1980., p.
87
  "A Brief History of Computing". alanturing.net. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
  Copeland, 2006, p. 173-175
  Horwood, 1973
  Winterbotham, Frederick William (15 November 1975). The Ultra Secret. New York:
Harper and Row. ISBN 978-0440190615.
  Good, Michie & Timms 1945.
  Sale, Tony. "The Colossus Rebuild Project". Retrieved 30 October 2011.
  "Cipher Challenge". Archived from the original on August 1, 2008. Retrieved February
1, 2012.
  "SZ42 Codebreaking Software".
  "Cracking the Lorenz Code (interview with Schüth)".
  Ward, Mark (16 November 2007). "BBC News Article". Retrieved 2 January 2010.

27.  "German Codebreaker receives Bletchley Park Honours".

 Chandler, W. W. (1983), "The Installation and Maintenance of Colossus", IEEE

Annals of the History of Computing 5 (3): 260–262, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1983.10083
 Coombs, Allen W. M. (July 1983), "The Making of Colossus", IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing 5 (3): 253–259, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1983.10085
 Jack Copeland, Colossus: Its Origins and Originators (IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, 26(4), October–December 2004, pp. 38–45).
 Jack Copeland, Colossus and the Dawning of the Computer Age, in Action This Day,
2001, ISBN 0-593-04982-9.
 Copeland, B. Jack, ed. (2006). Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's
Codebreaking Computers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-284055-
4
 Good, Jack; Michie, Donald; Timms, Geoffrey (1945), General Report on Tunny:
With Emphasis on Statistical Methods, UK Public Record Office HW 25/4 and HW
25/5, retrieved 15 September 2010 That version is a facsimile copy, but there is a
transcript of much of this document in '.pdf' format at: Sale, Tony (2001), Part of the
"General Report on Tunny", the Newmanry History, formatted by Tony Sale, retrieved
20 September 2010, and a web transcript of Part 1 at: Ellsbury, Graham, General
Report on Tunny With Emphasis on Statistical Methods, retrieved 3 November 2010
 I. J. Good, Early Work on Computers at Bletchley (IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, Vol. 1 (No. 1), 1979, pp. 38–48)
 I. J. Good, Pioneering Work on Computers at Bletchley (in Nicholas Metropolis, J.
Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota, (editors), A History of Computing in the Twentieth
Century, Academic Press, New York, 1980)
  T. H. Flowers, The Design of Colossus (Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 5
(No. 3), 1983, pp. 239–252)
 D C Horwood, A technical description of COLOSSUS I, August 1973, PRO HW
25/24.
 Brian Randell, Colossus: Godfather of the Computer, 1977 (reprinted in The Origins
of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1982)
 Brian Randell, The COLOSSUS (in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century)
 Sale, Tony (2000). "The Colossus of Bletchley Park - The German Cipher System". In
Rojas, Raúl; Hashagen, Ulf. The First Computers: History and Architecture.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 351–364. ISBN 0-262-18197-5.
 Albert W. Small, The Special Fish Report (December, 1944) describe the operation of
Colossus to break Tunny messages

Further reading
 Harvey G. Cragon, From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was
Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, Dallas, 2003; ISBN 0-9743045-0-6) – A
detailed description of the cryptanalysis of Tunny, and some details of Colossus
(contains some minor errors)
 Ted Enever, Britain's Best Kept Secret: Ultra's Base at Bletchley Park (Sutton
Publishing, Gloucestershire, 1999; ISBN 0-7509-2355-5) – A guided tour of the
history and geography of the Park, written by one of the founder members of the
Bletchley Park Trust
 Tony Sale, The Colossus Computer 1943–1996: How It Helped to Break the German
Lorenz Cipher in WWII (M.&M. Baldwin, Kidderminster, 2004; ISBN 0-947712-36-
4) – A slender (20 page) booklet, containing the same material as Tony Sale's website
(see below)
 Michael Smith, Station X, 1998. ISBN 0-330-41929-3.
 Gannon, Paul (2007), Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, Atlantic Books,
ISBN 978 1843543312
 Jack Copeland: Colossus. The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers.
Oxford University Press 2006. ISBN 0-19-284055-X
 R. Rojas, U. Hashagen (eds.): The First Computers: History and Architectures. MIT
Press 2000. ISBN 0-262-18197-5. – Comparison of the first computers, with a chapter
about Colossus and its reconstruction by Tony Sale.

Other websites

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Colossus computer

 The National Museum of Computing

 Tony Sale's Codes and Ciphers Contains a great deal of information, including:
o Colossus, the revolution in code breaking
o Lorenz Cipher and the Colossus
 The machine age comes to Fish codebreaking
 The Colossus Rebuild Project
 The Colossus Rebuild Project: Evolving to the Colossus Mk 2
  Walk around Colossus A detailed tour of the replica Colossus – make
sure to click on the "More Text" links on each image to see the
informative detailed text about that part of Colossus
o IEEE lecture – Transcript of a lecture Tony Sale gave describing the
reconstruction project
 BBC news article reporting on the replica Colossus
 BBC news article: "Colossus cracks codes once more"
 BBC news article: BBC news article: "Bletchley's code-cracking Colossus" with
video interviews 2010-02-02
 Website on Copeland's 2006 book with much information and links to recently
declassified information
 Was the Manchester Baby conceived at Bletchley Park?

Neil Armstrong
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong in July 1969

Historian of the Astronaut
In office
1969–1977
Preceded by Buzz Aldrin
Personal details
Neil Alden Armstrong
Born August 5, 1930
Wapakoneta, Ohio, U.S.
August 25, 2012 (aged 82)
Died
Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Nationality American
Residence Cincinnati, Ohio
Education Blume High School
 University of Southern California,
Alma mater
Purdue University
Known for First Man on the Moon

Signature

Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and
historian and is known as the first person to walk on the moon. On July 20, 1969, Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in a small spacecraft that had been sent to
the moon using the Saturn V rocket. The rocket was called Apollo 11. They both walked on
the moon, and millions of people watched and heard this event on live television.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical engineering from the Purdue

University and a Master of Science degree in Aerospace engineering from the University of
Southern California. In 1970 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering from the
Purdue University. From 1971 to 1979 he became professor for aerospace engineering at the
University of Cincinnati.

In 2005 he received the Honorary Doctorate of letters from the University of Southern
California. The Houston Chronicle newspaper reported on October 1, 2006, that Australian
computer programmer Peter Shann Ford found the missing "a" from Armstrong's famous first
words on the Moon. Ford reported that he downloaded the audio recording from a NASA
web site and analyzed it using editing software originally intended for use with hearing
disabled people. Armstrong is said to have been pleased with Ford's finding of the missing
"a".

1. 564782unvailblecode-number

Contents
 1 Career
 2 Moon Landing
 3 Personal Life
 4 Death
 5 References
 6 Other websites

Career
Prior to being an astronaut, Armstrong was called to Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida
in 1949 before he could complete his degree. There he earned his pilots wings at 20 years of
age, making him the youngest flyer in his squadron. While studying for his aeronautical
engineering degree, the Korean War broke out in 1950, in which he flew 78 combat missions.
His plane was shot down once and he was also awarded 3 Air Medals. Later, he became a
skilful test pilot, flying right to the atmosphere’s edge, 207,500 feet (63,200 m) at 4,000 miles
per hour (6,400 km/h), in the experimental rocket powered aircraft the X-15. Armstrong went
on his first mission into space on the 16th of March 1966, in the spacecraft Gemini 8, as the
command pilot. He docked the Gemini 8 successfully with an Agena target craft that was in
orbit already. Although the docking was smooth enough, while the spacecrafts orbited
together, they started to roll and pitch. Armstrong then managed to undock the Gemini, and
regained control of the spacecraft by using the retro rockets. However, this resulted in the
astronauts having to make an emergency landing into the Pacific Ocean.

Moon Landing
His most famous quote is: "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.
"

He spoke those words when he set his foot on the moon. He wanted to say "That's one small
step for a man…", but for some reason the "a" was never spoken. Armstrong thought he had
said it. Listening to the audio shows that the "for" runs on smoothly, giving no time for "a" to
be spoken. Armstrong prefers written quotations to include the "a" in parentheses!

Personal Life
Armstrong was married to Janet Shearon from 1956 until they divorced in 1994, they had
three children; Mark, Eric, and Karen. Lastly he married Carol Held Knight from 1994 until
his death in 2012.

Some years after returning from the Moon, he visited the two thousand year-old King Herod's
Temple Mount compound ruins in the city of Jerusalem. While he was there, Neil Armstrong
said it was more exciting to step on the stone stairs where Jesus Christ walked than even
stepping on the Moon.[1][2]

His biography describes him as a deist.

Death
Armstrong died on the morning of August 25, 2012 from complications of a blocked
coronary artery after surgery in a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was 82 years old.[3]

References
  Thomas L. Friedman(3-time Pulitzer Prize winner);book:From Beirut to
Jerusalem,pg.429;1989 and 2012,Farrar,Strauss and Giroux
  Meir Ben-Dov 1990:book:Jerusalem:Man and Stone ,p70

3.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/science/space/neil-armstrong-dies-first-man-
on-moon.html?pagewanted=all

Other websites
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Neil Armstrong

 http://www.buzzle.com/articles/facts-on-neil-armstrong.html
 http://space.about.com/od/astronautbiographies/a/Biography-of-Neil-Armstrong.htm