dec 1, 1943 - The Colossus was built, by Dr Thomas Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to crack the German Lorenz (SZ42) cipher. It contained 2400 vacuum tubes for logic and applied a programmable logical function to a stream of input characters, read from punched tape at a rate of 5000 characters a second. Colossus was used at Bletchley Park during World War II — as a successor to the unreliable Heath Robinson machines.
Added to timeline:
Date:
dec 1, 1943
Now
~ 81 years ago