THE full story of how Hitler's secret codes were cracked by a rudimentary computer was told officially for the first time yesterday.
The Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham declassified a two-volume technical report on Colossus, the forerunner of the post-war digital computer that saw the first practical use of large-scale program-controlled computing. Released through the Public Record Office, the 500-page report features photographs, specifications and detailed notes about Colossus and other code-breaking devices.
The report also contains the blueprint of Colossus 2, an upgraded "production model". This began operation on June 1, 1944, in time to decipher messages confirming that Hitler had swallowed the Allies' deception campaigns, giving them the confidence to go ahead with the invasion of Europe.
More Colossi followed at the rate of about one a month and by the end of the war there were 10 at Bletchley Park, the secret codebreaking establishment in Buckinghamshire.
The report is called the The History of the Newmanry after the special unit at Bletchley responsible for cracking high level military codes. It was named after its founder, the mathematician Max Newman, one of the Code and Cypher School's most outstanding figures.
A standard history of computing will probably claim that the first electronic digital computer was America's ENIAC, which went into operation in 1946. But Colossus 2 had a functionality equal to the much later ENIAC, and a vastly greater data-processing ability.
Dr Donald Michie, now 76 and emeritus professor of machine intelligence at Edinburgh University, was one of Newman's colleagues. He said: "Some will be startled to know that by VE Day Britain had a machine room of some 10 high-speed electronic computers on three-shift operation round the clock."
7 September 2000: [Connected] Colossal code of silence broken
13 July 2000: [Connected] A machine with all the answers [James Dyson's History of Inventions]
16 October 1999: A tale of intrigue, death threats and sacking at code-crackers' museum [Bletchley Park]
11 September 1999: [Features] The brains behind the Code War
11 June 1999: Bletchley Park saved after eight-year battle
1 July 1997: [Connected] Curiosity v code: hackers are heirs to an ancient tradition
