Royal Mail's Colossus move gets ex-WREN's stamp of approval

Hollywood Angle

"I shudder at the thought of what PBS would do in a documentary about Tommy Flowers. As for Hollywood ......"

as there's no LGBT angle on Flowers that would make him current news, like his pardon for his crimes in the day, why include him?

Plenty of people worked on the systems, not all were English or from friendly (at the time) nations.

History is always written by the victors, hence the USA started, fought and won the entire war (don't you notice they always win in Vietnam war films?)

Most of the key players still cant / wont talk about it for fear of the Gov and hostile nations retaliating for their efforts

Re: Real nostalgia...

"and turning it off and turning it on again was exactly the wrong thing to do"

+1 insightful.

Re: Tutte Tutte

The most important one was encrypted twice, using the same key, but with slight changes to the plaintext - that's what enabled Bill Tutte to work out the nature of the Lorenz system.

There was only one message like that. John Tiltman originally decrypted it, and Bill Tutte used it, in one of the greatest intellectual feats of WWII, to determine the workings of the Lorenz machine which was, in effect, a mechanical pseudo random number generator. Tutte also devised a methodology to decrypt the messages, but it was beyond what could be done manually.Max Newman had the idea to use electronics for the task and Tommy Flowers built the machine to do it. Turing had some input to the process, but it was those three, who got little or no recognition, who did the actual job.

Read "Colossus" by B. Jack Copeland and others for the full story.

Re: B-Dienst

Konrad Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer.[1][2][3][4]

The Z3 was an electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer.[1] The Z3 was built with 2000 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz.[2] Program code and data were stored on punched film.

The Z3 was completed in Berlin in 1941.

Relation to other work

The success of Zuse's Z3 is often attributed to its use of the simple binary system.[17] This was invented roughly three centuries earlier by Gottfried Leibniz; Boole later used it to develop his Boolean algebra. In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse however did not know Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[18] for his first computer Z1 which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.

Zuse's coworker Helmut Schreyer built an electronic digital experimental model of a computer using 100 vacuum tubes[19] in 1942, but it was lost at the end of the war.

The Tommy Flowers-built Colossus (1943)[20] and the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (1942) used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) and binary representation of numbers. Programming was by means of re-plugging patch panels and setting switches.

Colossus was not "The world’s first electronic, programmable computer," and so what but a lie is still a lie. I suppose the I in us is just too strong when it comes to them others. We in the west have a similar problem when it comes to who ended the war in Europe.

Re: WRENs

Surely she did that so it did appear normal when you looked back?...

(I'll get my coat)