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◈ALB Atlas

Colossus Lost

Colossus
KindMachine
Introduced1943
Discontinued1945
StatusLost
ManufacturerTommy Flowers / GPO
ClassEarly computer
PlatformValves, 1,500–2,400
Sourcewww.tnmoc.org ↗

The first programmable electronic digital computer — built at Bletchley Park to break the Lorenz cipher, then classified into oblivion. Ten were built and dismantled; a working reconstruction now runs at Bletchley.

Created by Tommy Flowers

Tommy Flowers of the Post Office Research Station designed Colossus to break the Lorenz cipher — a machine he built partly with his own money when brass doubted valves could be reliable. The Mark 1 ran January 1944; ten machines ran in total, processing messages at 5,000 characters/second.

All ten were dismantled by 1960 and the blueprints burned — Flowers couldn't even claim patent priority. A functional reconstruction (by Tony Sale's team) has run at The National Museum of Computing since 2007.

→ Read the full article on the ALB Wiki

Sources

  1. tnmoc.org/colossus
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer