[GreenKeys] Colossus is 73

[Craig Sawyers]

> Excellent history of the Colossus and worthwhile videos about the creation - and restoration - of
the
> world's first electronic computer:
>
> http://www.tnmoc.org/explore/colossus-gallery

Tony Sale was a really fine guy, who I got to know very well during the time I restored the Lorenz
SZ42 at Bletchley. He died well before his time, but his delightful wife is still going strong and
very involved with TNMOC.

Once the SZ42 was fully functional we could demonstrate the complete German encryption/Bletchley
Park decryption system end to end. Tony organised a "cipher challenge" where we would transmit coded
messages from the SZ42, which we had shipped to the Heinz Nixdorf museum in Paderborn. The
modulation scheme and transmitter power were replicated by the local radio ham society in Paderborn.
The challenge was for anyone to intercept the message and decrypt it before Bletchley's period
equipment could receive it, including the undulator, transcription to punched tape, and decryption
by Colossus.

I was responsible for the German side, and Tony handled the Bletchley side. It was a quite amazing
event. One of the people who attended in Germany was an expert in "secret writing", and was in the
Abwehr in WW2. Very elderly of course. Over a very nice dinner, he volunteered that as a young
officer he stood just behind Hitler at the Nuremburg rally. One of the other German guys at the
table chirped up "Why the hell didn't you just shoot the bastard, and save us all a hell of a lot of
trouble!" He replied "Hey - I was 16 at the time. It just did not cross my mind"

Anyway, a guy somewhere in Germany who was an IT god, got wind of the Challenge and wrote an
efficient programme to solve the code. Using a state of the art machine it took 20 minutes to solve
as compared with just over an hour on Colossus.

We invited him to TNMOC, and awarded him with a prize.

Craig