Codebreaking veterans and their families yesterday celebrated the 70th anniversary of the world’s first electronic computer.
Seven decades ago, the code-breaking Colossus Mark I attacked its first message written in the complex code used by Hitler and his generals during World War II.
Regarded as the world’s first digital, electronic computer, Colossus was built to speed up code-breaking of the sophisticated Lorenz cipher.
By the end of the war there were 10 functioning Colossi machines, which had a decisive impact on the war.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the machine, Colossus veterans and their families yesterday gathered at The National Museum of Computing at code-breaking institution Bletchley Park where they saw a re-enactment of the code-breaking process from intercept to decrypt with a working rebuild of Colossus.
German teleprinter signals encrypted by Lorenz machines were first heard in Britain by police officers on the south coast listening for possible spy transmissions in 1940. In August 1941, an error by a German operator allowed Colonel John Tiltman, a top codebreaker at Bletchley Park, to decipher a message, and mathematician Bill Tutte went on to deduce the complete structure of the Lorenz machine.
Codebreakers in the Testery – the Bletchley Park section founded to break the Tunny code – began breaking the codes by hand, but mathematician Max Newman started work to automate the system.
British engineer Tommy Flowers tried to improve his method, which used electro-mechanical Robinson machines, and instead designed Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer – which worked by finding the start-wheel positions of Lorenz-encrypted messages.
The machine enabled the start-wheel positions to be found in a few hours, shortening the code-breaking process and allowing larger numbers of messages to be broken.
Colossus Mark I, which began operating on February 5, 1944, was succeeded in June that year by the Mark II. By the end of the war, 63 million characters of high-grade German messages had been decrypted by the 550 people working on the Colossi at Bletchley Park.
The messages provided the Allies with crucial intelligence on what enemy forces were planning, giving them decisive advantages – such as knowing that Hitler believed the D-Day landings in June 1944 would be at Calais rather than Normandy.
The existence of Colossus was kept top secret for 30 years because of the sophistication and sensitivity around the encryption it had helped to break. Many of those who worked on it went on to build other computers and technology.
Occupying the size of a living room, Colossus weighed five tons, used 8kW of power and incorporated 2,500 valves and 10,000 resistors connected by seven kilometres of wiring.