Colossus

"Colossus was the world's first programmable electronic digital computer. British code breakers used Colossus to help to read German coded radio messages during World War II. "

  • It was released in 1943 of December.
  • Also during World War II.
  • Tommy Flowers was the creator of Colossus.
  • First programmable computer.
  • Colossus helped to read German coded radio messages.
  • Tommy Flowers spent eleven months building Colossus.



Colossus was a set of computers developed by British code breakers in 1943-1945 to help in the crypt-analysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and was operational at Bletchley Park on 5 February 1944. An improved Colossus Mark 2 that used shift registers to quintuple the processing speed, first worked on 1 June 1944, just in time for the Normandy Landings.Successively larger and more-elaborate versions were built over the next two years, and by the end of the war 10 models operated around the clock for Tunny breaking.The destruction of the Colossus machines and documents, as part of the effort to maintain a project secrecy that was kept up into the 1970's , deprived most of those involved with Colossus, of credit for their pioneering advancements in electronic digital computing during their lifetimes. A functioning replica of a Colossus computer was completed in 2007 and is on display at the moment.