A secret British supercomputer helped in the fight against the Nazis

British intelligence agency GCHQ has released previously unknown photos of a supercomputer dubbed "Colossus" that was secretly built during World War II and helped London decode correspondence between senior Nazi officials.
The operation of this computer was so well hidden that British intelligence did not officially acknowledge its existence until the early 2000s. But now GCHQ has decided to reveal more about the decisive invention in honor of its 80th anniversary, the BBC reports.
The famous British scientist Alan Turing, who was involved in deciphering the Nazi messages encoded by the Enigma machine, was not directly involved in the Colossus project.
Turing's developments helped create the supercomputer, but his own deciphering machine was electromechanical rather than electronic and had been created several years earlier.
Some consider the Colossus to be the first digital computer in history. It consisted of 2,500 lamps, and the device was over two meters high. A whole group of skilled engineers was needed to operate and maintain the computer.
Anne Kist-Butler, head of British electronic intelligence at GCHQ, said the pictures released show the creative and technical effort that was needed to defend Britain from the Nazis.
"Technological innovation has always been at the heart of our work at GCHQ and Colossus is a great example of how our staff have helped us stay at the forefront of new technology, even at times when we couldn't tell you about it." says Kist-Butler.
The first "Colossus" began to work in early 1944. It was installed in the Bletchley Park estate in the English county of Buckinghamshire, where the headquarters of the British decipherers is located.
By the end of World War II, British experts had created 10 computers that helped decipher Nazi messages.
At the time of the defeat of Nazi Germany, British secret computers were manned by 550 people and managed to decipher 63 million characters of top secret Nazi messages.
To mark the anniversary of Colossus' creation, GCHQ has also released its schematics for the first time, one of the secret letters deciphered by the computer (it mentions "rather disturbing instructions from Germany"), and an audio recording of the sounds of the operation the machine.
Among other things, "Colossus" allowed the Allies to find out whether Hitler believed the deliberately false information that the landing of troops in France in June 1944 would take place in Calais and not in Normandy (as it actually was) .
Historians believe that the operation of British computers helped bring the war to a faster end and saved the lives of many soldiers.
Although the work of the Colossus supercomputer and others like it had a very large impact on the course of the story, all participants in the project signed a non-disclosure agreement. It was so strictly enforced that the existence of the program was not mentioned in the history books for almost 60 years.
After the war, eight of the ten computers that decoded Nazi messages were destroyed.
The machine's creator, British engineer Tommy Flowers, was ordered to hand over all documentation of his invention to GCHQ.
The British authorities were so successful in keeping the program's existence a secret that even many years later a GCHQ official who worked on one of the Colossi in the 1960s admitted he knew nothing about the computer's role in World War II war.
Andrew Herbert, head of the National Computer Museum's board of trustees at Bletchley Park, says Colossus is an important precursor to the modern electronic digital computer.
“Many of those who worked on Colossus at Bletchley Park went on to play important roles in the British computer industry. In the post-war decades they were often world leaders in their field,” says Herbert. /BGNES