Tommy Flowers, who built the world's first electronic computer, Colossus, was developing the idea of an electronic telephone exchange for the Post Office when World War II broke out.
Alan Turing asked Flowers to work at
Flowers proposed a machine using 1800 vacuum tubes. The management wouldn't back it, but suggested Flowers build it himself which he did. The machine was called Colossus.
Colossus was ready on June 2nd 1944. On June 5th 1944, Colossus decoded an intercepted German message which showed that Hitler thought the preparations for D-Day were a feint and ordered that no more troops should be sent to
The decoded message was handed to Dwight Eisenhower. After reading it, Eisenhower said: ""We go tomorrow."
This article claims that the first electronic computer was built by Professor John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry from 1939 to 1942 at Iowa State University. This was two years before the above quoted completion of Colossus.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050898.htm
Yes, good point George, but was Professor Atanasoff's machine a computer in view of the fact it was not programmable?
My father-in-law (Bill Chandler) was responsible for much of the circuit design, construction and debugging of Colossus; it was Colossus Mk II (5x as fast as the Mk I) that they were desperately trying to get working in time to give the go-ahead for D-day.
He found and fixed the bug (parasitic VHF oscillation) about 2 o'clock in the morning and the critical decode runs started the following day, just in time for D-day to go ahead.
It says a lot about their attitude in those days that he was working alone overnight on live (several kV!) circuits, and when heavy rain started to leak through the roof of the hut he just put his wellies on :-)
Like everyone else involved, he kept all his work totally secret until the 1980's -- all my wife knew was that he worked for the Post Office, and for no obvious reason had several books on cryptography and codebreaking on the bookshelf in the living room.
Bill did tell me that when he was recruited into the project he was taken into a small room by an officer who sat him down, slammed a revolver onto the table between them, and said that if he ever breathed a word to anyone about anything he would personally shoot him with said revolver.
The tragedy of all this was that something which would probably have led to Britain leading the world in computer development -- at least, until we failed to capitalize on it -- was totally buried in the name of national security.
One reason was that since nobody else knew that the encryption had been cracked, the same encoding machines could be (and were) sold to many other governments worldwide, who used them for years unaware that we could read all their most confidential traffic...
So the spooks won over the interests of industry yet again :-(
Ian
That's an amazing tale, Ian, thanks very much. They were the most incredible generation those guys who won the war. And that's the greatest explanation I've ever heard of why Britain didn't take over the world computer industry.
The 'management' wouldn't back Flowers' design because they thought that the vacuum tubes would be too unreliable - as many people had experienced at the time (and still do, no doubt).
Flowers realised that they were only unreliable if regularly turned on and off. His 'bet' was that he could get the system working with all those tubes only if it was never switched off! He was right of course...
Another 'first' for Flowers was the use of differential signals to carry the 0's and 1's. It meant he could easily invert a signal by just swapping the wires over!
Interesting story, Ian.
It may be worth pointing out that in the following year, ten Colossi were ordered, installed and operational. Such was the reliability and usefulness of this first computer. The order for number 11 was canceled by VE day. (number 11 is, I believe the Colossus rebuild now at Bletchley Musuem)
geoff
Most of the Colossi were broken up after the war and all the documents were supposed to have been destroyed (except for some engineers logbooks, thankfully for the BP rebuild), but I believe there was one Colossus Mk II still installed and functioning (decoding foreign code, I expect) at GCHQ well into the 60's...
Ian
Fascinating stuff, thanks Ian
On their post war use, Russian codes perhaps? Roy Jenkins worked briefly on these (he was in the Testery) as I was informed by an ex-Testery co-worker a few years ago. But he was more suited to politics and became more successful there.
Fascinating, geoff-s, I had no idea. I saw Roy Jenkins at the Beetle & Wedge at Moulsford.
I'm sure I remember one of the TV programmes about the cracking of the Enigma saying that post-war, Britain sent lots of Enigma machines (or copies) to its allies and the rest of the Commonwealth, telling everyone that it was unbreakable, and that the machine(s) kept for GCHQ were used for cracking messages sent using those machines (and therefore spying on our allies and "friends")
Funnily enough, David, Ian Dedic of Fujitsu made that very point here last week (Feb 16). His father-in-law worked on Colossus. It's such a good tale that I reproduce it here:
Ian wrote:
My father-in-law (Bill Chandler) was responsible for much of the circuit design, construction and debugging of Colossus; it was Colossus Mk II (5x as fast as the Mk I) that they were desperately trying to get working in time to give the go-ahead for D-day. He found and fixed the bug (parasitic VHF oscillation) about 2 o'clock in the morning and the critical decode runs started the following day, just in time for D-day to go ahead. It says a lot about their attitude in those days that he was working alone overnight on live (several kV!) circuits, and when heavy rain started to leak through the roof of the hut he just put his wellies on :-) Like everyone else involved, he kept all his work totally secret until the 1980's -- all my wife knew was that he worked for the Post Office, and for no obvious reason had several books on cryptography and codebreaking on the bookshelf in the living room. Bill did tell me that when he was recruited into the project he was taken into a small room by an officer who sat him down, slammed a revolver onto the table between them, and said that if he ever breathed a word to anyone about anything he would personally shoot him with said revolver. The tragedy of all this was that something which would probably have led to Britain leading the world in computer development -- at least, until we failed to capitalize on it -- was totally buried in the name of national security. One reason was that since nobody else knew that the encryption had been cracked, the same encoding machines could be (and were) sold to many other governments worldwide, who used them for years unaware that we could read all their most confidential traffic... So the spooks won over the interests of industry yet again :