Growing Up<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Born in December of 1905 in London, Flowers took an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering and eventually attended the University of London, where he got a degree in electrical engineering. By 1926, he was a member of the General Post Office, where he served in telecommunications and then in their research center. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Flowers married in 1935 and had two sons. By 1939, he believed in the possibility of an all-electronic system as World War II began. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Beginnings of War<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n Heath Robinson. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n As the GPO research unit relocated, their skills were to be utilized for the war. Alan Turing asked Flowers for help in building a Bombe Machine decoder for decoding German messages. While Flowers failed, he made an impression on Turing, who introduced him to mathematician Max Newman, who had followed William Tutte\u2019s work in decoding. Tuttle was thorough, but his process was slow. They were decoding by hand\u2014and eventually by a simple machine called <\/span>Heath Robinson<\/span><\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Flowers was asked to fix <\/span>Heath Robinson<\/span><\/i>, but he believed himself capable of building a new and better version, which he attempted in February of 1943. He worked until December, which is when Colossus was born. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Colossus Emerges<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the first programmable computers in the world, Colossus represented a major engineering feat. With approximately 1,800 valves and only one paper tape, people warned that it might be unreliable because of failing valves. But Flowers knew that valve failure was largely the result of machines being turned off and on, and Colossus was designed to run constantly. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Because so many doubted his process, Flowers funded Colossus with his own money and built it in his own time. In 1943, he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire and received full backing from the director of Dollis Hill, which meant his team received priority status to acquire parts for their wartime research. In 11 months, they had a machine\u2014named Colossus because of its size. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Success of Colossus<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n Where <\/span>Heath Robinson <\/span><\/i>read only 1,000 characters a minute (and sometimes less, because of poor reliability), Colossus read 5,000 characters a minute and maintained reliability. <\/span>Heath Robinson <\/span><\/i>continued to be useful in certain scenarios, eventually morphing into <\/span>Super Robinson<\/span><\/i> at the hands of Flowers, which ran four tapes and could be used for running known-plaintext attack runs. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Colossus was five times faster than Heath Robinson and was delivered to Bletchley Park in January of 1944. It was in operation by February. Tutte and his team of mathematicians provided algorithms, and Flowers got to work on the second version of the programmable computer, called the Mark II, which utilized roughly 2,400 valves and was functional by June of 1944. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The computer gave Allied Supreme Commanders almost instant access to information broadcast over the Lorenz System without alerting Nazis that there had been a breach. The information acquired helped plan D-Day\u2014and likely saved thousands of lives. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n By the War\u2019s End<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to D-Day, the computer decoded communications that indicated Hitler thought the D-Day landings would happen at Pays de Calais. Accordingly, he would not move troops to Normandy, which saved lives during the Normandy landings. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the World War II, there were 10 Colossus machines, eight of which were dismantled immediately. The remaining two were used at GCHQ but were also dismantled between 1959 and 1960, never to be seen again\u2014or at least, not for a while. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n And what of Tommy Flowers? He received a sum of money for the machine, which didn\u2019t actually cover what he\u2019d spent to bring it to reality. And still, he divided it up amongst his team. After the war, Flowers remained under the Official Secrets Act, where his work remained hidden from the public, as the \u201cfirst\u201d computer was announced in 1948. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.autodesk.com\/products\/fusion-360\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Screen-Shot-2019-01-03-at-9.44.21-AM-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.autodesk.com\/products\/fusion-360\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/the-colossus-1024x712.jpg\")