"I don't think they understood very clearly what I was proposing until they actually had the machine. They obviously were taken aback - they just couldn't believe it!"
Tommy Flowers, creator of Colossus
Rather than get up at some ungodly hour on Tuesday to drive to Stansted we decided to drive down on Monday and stay overnight near the airport. One bonus of doing this is we were able to visit the Bletchley Park museum which is dedicated to the wartime code breakers and it gave me the chance to pay homage to the patron Saint of telephone engineers – Tommy Flowers.
You have probably only ever heard of Alan Turing, the chap who was hounded by the authorities because of his homosexuality and was featured in the film Enigma. People say he invented the computer but in practice he only did half the job, he designed the architecture and how the processor would work but someone had to design the electronics to make it happen and that man was Tommy who was seconded from the GPO labs where he was responsible for telephone exchange design. His first electronic computer, built to decode German messages, had 1800 valves (transistors were not invented until 1947).
There was a great deal of political rivalry, the first decoding machines were built by a company who made adding machines, they did not trust these new fangled electronic gimics and rubbished Tommy's work, hence the quote at the top of the page.
They did not believe such a large and complex machine would be reliable enough but Tommy was used to designing telecoms kit which has to work continuosly.
Of course the critics companies were making money out of building the mechanical decoders so did not want any competition but their machines could not decode the top German messages which had a much higher level of encyption.
After the war Tommy developed the first digital telephone exchange, but like all ex Bletchley Park employees, had to keep the Enigma work secret. There is a lovely story of him attending a PC beginners course in the 1980’s at the North London equivalent of Enterprise House Business Centre and being presented with his certificate, he built his first computer 10 years before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born!
Bletchley Park is a very interesting museum which took us three hours to go round. Above is an Enigma machine which was what the Germans used to encrypt and decode the messages and right is Alan Turing's office but the Lucas museum curse struck, Tommys computer (actually a working replica) is housed in the Museum of computing next door, guess what - closed on Mondays!
So tomorrow we catch a plane to Morocco for a bit of sunshine and hopefully no rain.