It's great that people like Tommy Flowers are remembered by the National Computing Museum. Tommy was the engineer who designed and built Colossus so it had the performance to do what was required.
Original WWII German message decrypts to go on display at National Museum of Computing
Bletchley Park's National Museum of Computing will be exhibiting original, freshly discovered decrypted WWII messages to coincide with the 75th anniversary of D-Day this June – messages that were broken by the Colossus machines based on the museum's site. The decrypts are due to be put on display in The National Museum of …
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Tuesday 5th February 2019 13:45 GMT MJB7
Re: Tommy Flowers
But it still annoys me that he was turned down for a loan to build computers because the bank didn't believe the machines would work. He couldn't tell them that he'd already built them (and they did work) because it was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
Now it may well be that Britain would still have found a way to piss away our computer industry, but the marginal improvement in our security provided by keeping Colossus secret has probably been _very_ expensive.
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Wednesday 6th February 2019 02:17 GMT JJKing
Re: Tommy Flowers
Not quite correct there Scott. The Banking Royal Commission that was just held in Australia discovered the banks, and I assume via their computers, were charging dead people fees for services that they obviously weren't getting. One of those cheated had been dead for 13 years and the banks thinks they did nothing wrong. It was just a mistake apparently.
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Tuesday 5th February 2019 19:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Tommy Flowers
The reason it was kept secret was because the machines were still in use after WWII and British Intelligence wanted to be able to continue to intercept messages without anyone knowing that was possible.
Other, more sophisticated rotor-based machines like the Fialka were also developed that could be cracked using the same techniques.
However, the idea behind the machine could probably have been used without giving away where the idea had evolved or what it was used for.
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Tuesday 5th February 2019 13:39 GMT Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese
Colossus earned its official name well, standing 7ft tall and 17ft wide (2m x 5m) and weighing in at five metric tonnes.
I wonder how much processing power you get in that volume/weight?
A 3rd dimension measurement would be useful to calculate just how many Raspberry Pis you could cram into a space that size.
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Tuesday 5th February 2019 14:30 GMT Potemkine!
Polish plumbers
Let's not forget the work of the Polish mathematicians who laid the groundwork for the celebrated efforts of Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park.
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Tuesday 5th February 2019 20:33 GMT DiViDeD
Re: Polish plumbers
"downvoted for a question?"
That's how it goes round here. There's the autoscanners who read part of a post, just enough to get the spittle flashing, and then there's the regular ElReg 'didn't you even know that?' Superior Commentard,
In fact, I might just vote you down myself, just for the lulz.
Don't let it get to you, m8
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Tuesday 5th February 2019 16:36 GMT GremlinUK
TNMOC is not "Bletchley Park's National Museum of Computing". It is it's own self.
It's also a damn sight better at presenting the story of computing than anything on the neighbouring site, for a much more reasonable entry price. Don't bother with Bletchley unless you want cryptography-lite and Churchill-the-hero. If you want the real thing, go next door.
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Thursday 7th February 2019 02:27 GMT Sam_B.
Re: Terminology
Metric Tonne is a Tautology, but it is also irrelevant if compared to an Imperial or Long Ton as you do, as the mass of the machine is unlikely to be exactly 1 Tonne, to better than the 2% accuracy of 1 Ton. On the other hand it may become relevant when compared to the U.S. or Short Ton which is 93Kg out, and still in common usage.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
