The Computer That Helped Win World War II

One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German Enigma network, the “new music” was a rhythmic warble of binary teletype code being transmitted at high speed.Germany’s wartime engineers had developed a radically new encryption and transmission system. It was way more advanced than Enigma, which was patented in 1920.To break the complex new cipher, engineer Tommy Flowers built Colossus, the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic digital computer. Flowers previously built Enigma-related codebreaking equipment for Alan Turing, the British mathematician.Colossus was installed in the British codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, about 80 kilometers from London. The room-size machine weighed around a tonne.The computer is being commem