Colossus
Colossus was
built for the code-breakers at Bletchley Park by Tommy Flowers
and his team of post office engineers
in 1943. Using standard post office equipment, Tommy Flowers
developed a machine that could work at 5000 characters a second,
four times faster than anything built before. He went on to
develop Colossus Mark 2, which could work at five time faster than
the original Colossus.
The
computer was as big as a room - 5 metres long, 3 metres deep and
2.5 metres high - and weighed over a ton. Colossus worked
by 'reading', through a photoelectric system, a teleprinter tape
containing the letters of the coded message. It read 5,000
letters a second.
All
possible combinations of the coded message were checked with the
cypher key generated by Colossus. A teleprinter typed out the
results of Colossus's search, revealing the settings which had
been used by the Germans to send their messages. Ten Colossus
Mark 2s were eventually built. A complete Mark 2 Colossus machine has
recently been rebuilt and is on display at Bletchley Park.
The information
revealed by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park was called ULTRA.
ULTRA was so secret that only those who needed to know about it
- like the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill - were told
of its existence.
Did
the code-breakers and ULTRA help to win the war?
