Imagine spending years of your life working on a cutting-edge new invention for the government – which incidentally you have to part-pay-for out of your own pocket – only to be told to smash it to pieces and burn all evidence. This is exactly what happened to Tommy Flowers and even now, nearly 70 years later, his first computer, Colossus, is still far more well-known than he is.
A dapper man walks down an institutional corridor, turns right into a room, flicks on the light switch and shuts the door: “This was our Battersea Bridge Laboratory,” he says, making his way into the large grey and white space.
“And [this is] where we assembled the first Colossus…”
This is Tommy Flowers, father of computing, and under-celebrated hero of World War II code-breaking. In recent years the fame of Colossus has grown exponentially – a quick Amazon search reveals numerous books on the subject. Yet far less is generally known about Flowers himself, the man behind the idea, who put both his back and his cash into the project.
via IDG Connect
Image credit: BT via Flickr
