Code computer celebrations
1 min read
Seventy years ago Colossus was used to decipher German codes for the first time. While this became a breakthrough in intelligence that is claimed to have reduced the war by years, it was also the first application of an electronic computer.
Seventy years on from 5th February 1944, a group of veterans and their families are gathering at the National Museum of Computing (NMOC) where a reconstructed and fully working Colossus is the prime exhibit.
NMOC is located at Bletchley Park, in Milton Keynes, the secret home to the 'code breakers' during the war. Colossus was designed for a single purpose, to calculate the changing starting positions of the Lorenz machines that were used by the German military. Once the starting positions were known the codes could be deciphered by hand. A team of 550 people working with the ten Colossus machines decrypted around 63 million characters of German code during the war.
Tim Reynolds, Chair of The National Museum of Computing, said: "The achievements of those who worked at Bletchley Park are humbling. Bill Tutte's ingenuity in deducing out how the Lorenz machine worked without ever having seen it, the skill of those in the Testery who broke the cipher by hand, and Tommy Flowers' design of the world's first electronic computer Colossus to speed up the code-breaking process are feats almost beyond comprehension.
"February 5 will be a proud day for the Museum to host the Colossus and Tunny veterans who are able to make the journey today. This day is in honour of all the men and women who worked on breaking the Lorenz cipher."
