The British government is celebrating the 80th anniversary of Colossus, the code-breaking machine used by Germany that significantly helped Allied forces in World War II. Its importance was so great, they say, on a par with Alan Turing's work in deciphering the Enigma machines to ensure that this computer was allowed to the Allies “Reading Hitler’s Mind”.
Colossus was not a simple computer, but a series of machines developed by British scientists between 1943 and 1945 2 meter tall electronic beasts They played a key role in deciphering the “Lorenz Cipher,” a code used for communications between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe.
The technology behind Colossus It was completely innovative for its time.. Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind his design, used more than 2,500 vacuum tubes to create logic gates, a precursor to the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers.
Colossus, naked
To celebrate the 80th anniversary of these machines, GCHQ (UK Government Communications Department) has released never-before-seen images of the infrastructure and related information that was previously classified.
Indeed, the existence of Colossus It was only officially confirmed by the British government at the beginning of this century.. So much so that the ENIAC of 1945 was considered the great pioneer of digital computing for decades, when there was already another predecessor machine that, with its revelation, was already taking its place in history. The British government ordered the destruction of most of the machines and those responsible had to hand over all related documents.
GCHQ now claims that the underlying technology was “so effective that its functionality was still used by us”. until the early 1960s«. The public exchange of archival documents includes several photos of the computer at different times, as well as a letter about the story of Tommy Flower and his groundbreaking work intercepting “quite alarming German instructions.”
Of ten Colossus machines, only two survived the 1940s and were only dismantled in the 1960s. After beginning work on a reconstruction project in the 1990s, engineer Tony Sale completed a 90 percent operational machine, which is on display at the National Computing Museum in Bletchley Park.
Its president has highlighted the importance of Colossus in changing the course of the great war: “From a technical perspective, Colossus was an important precursor to the modern electronic digital computer, and many of its users became important pioneers and leaders of British computing in the decades after the war.”