{"id":4,"date":"2012-08-02T05:11:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T05:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mariehicks.net\/blog\/?p=4"},"modified":"2019-07-24T01:28:46","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T06:28:46","slug":"colossus_rebuild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"Bletchley Park&#8217;s Colossus Rebuild"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This summer, while doing research at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">UK National Archives<\/a>, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a side-trip to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bletchleypark.org.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bletchley Park historical site<\/a> in Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mariehicks.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/bletchleyhuts2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-43\" title=\"bletchleyhuts2\" src=\"http:\/\/mariehicks.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/bletchleyhuts2-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/bletchleyhuts2-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/bletchleyhuts2.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a>The site of some of the most important codebreaking of World War II, Bletchley Park now functions as a museum of early British codebreaking and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tnmoc.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">computing<\/a>. A dedicated team there has painstakingly constructed a working model of the Colossus, the 1900-vaccuum tube behemoth designed and built by London Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers in 1943 to speed &#8220;Tunny&#8221; codebreaking operations using codebreaker William Tutte&#8217;s statistical method. The Colossus rebuild is a sight to behold&#8211;and hear&#8211;as you can see from the video below:<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wSIwCvcchnA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Though Turing and his electromechanical Bombes get a lot of credit for wartime codebreaking successes (there is a working Bombe rebuild at BP too), it was Flowers&#8217;s Colossi that sped up British codebreaking to the point of maximal utility. They were the first digital, programmable computers to harness the speed of electronics for time-sensitive, mission-critical work. His team produced 10 of the massive machines between late 1943 and the war&#8217;s end, frantically working out of a factory-like workshop in Birmingham after building the first Colossus at the Dollis Hill Research Station in London. Colossus II, installed just days before D-Day, was so critical to the success of the D-Day landings that (as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rutherfordjournal.org\/article030109.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">B. Jack Copeland reports<\/a>) the operators had to keep the machine running despite the floor being flooded&#8211;they put on thick rubber boots so that they didn&#8217;t get electrocuted.<\/p>\n<p>You can see an image of Women&#8217;s Royal Naval Service members working on a Colossus <a href=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/4\/4b\/Colossus.jpg\/2880px-Colossus.jpg\">here<\/a>. (From I. J. Good, D. Michie, and G. Timms, General Report on Tunny With Emphasis on Statistical Methods, 1945, 332, HW 2\/25, TNA). The workers have been identified as Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right) by historian B. Jack Copeland.)<\/p>\n<p>While I was at the exhibit, I overheard a father trying to explain to his young son what the Colossus was, in terms he thought the boy might understand. Brandishing his iPhone, he said: &#8220;See, this phone is millions of times more powerful than that big computer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Call me back when your iPhone wins a war, I thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This summer, while doing research at the UK National Archives, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a side-trip to the Bletchley Park historical site in Milton Keynes. The site of some of the most important codebreaking of World War II, Bletchley Park now functions as a museum of early British codebreaking and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[7,11,5,8,6,9,10],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-computing","category-uncategorized","tag-bletchley","tag-codebreaking","tag-colossus","tag-gender","tag-history-of-computing","tag-labor","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marhicks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}