The British government is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Colossus, a code-breaking machine used by Germany that significantly aided the Allied forces during the Second World War. They say that his importance was so great that it rivaled Alan Turing’s work on the Enigma machines because he ensured that this computer allowed the Allies “read Hitler’s mind”.

Colossus was not a simple computer, but a series of machines developed by British scientists between 1943 and 1945. 2 meter high electronic beast They played a key role in breaking the “Lorenzo Cipher”, a code used for communication between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe.

The technology behind Colossus It was quite innovative for its time.. Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind its design, used more than 2,500 tubes to create logic gates, the forerunners of the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers.

Colossus, naked

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of these machines, GCHQ (the UK government’s communications department) has released never-before-seen images of the infrastructure and related information, which was previously classified.

In fact, the very existence of Colossus This was officially confirmed by the British government only at the beginning of this century.. So much so that the ENIAC of 1945 was considered the great pioneer of digital computing for decades, when there was another previous machine already taking its place in history with its revelation. The UK government issued orders to destroy most of the machines and those responsible had to hand over all related documentation.

GCHQ now claims that the underlying technology “It was so effective that we still used its functionality until the early 1960s«. The public exchange of archival documents includes several photographs of the computer from various periods and a letter about the history of Tommy Flower and his pioneering work that referred to the capture “rather alarming German instructions”.

Of the 10 Colossus machines, only two survived the 1940s and were dismantled in the 1960s. After work began on the rebuilding project in the 1990s, engineer Tony Sale completed one of the 90 percent complete operational works on display at National Computing. Museum at Bletchley Park.

His president emphasized the importance of the Colossus in changing the course of the great war: “Technically, the Colossus was an important forerunner of the modern electronic digital computer, and many of those who used it became significant pioneers and leaders in British computing in the decades after the war..