10.6

**Dead medium: the Bletchley Park Colossus**

From: bruces_AT_well.com (Bruce Sterling)

(((Through happy accident I have found an eyewitness account of the newly resurrected Bletchley Park Colossus, as mentioned in Working Note 10.5. This report is by Brian Randell (Brian.Randell_AT_newcastle.ac.uk) and was distributed on Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list. == bruces)))

The Colossus Rebuild Project

by Brian Randell

Yesterday I attended the ceremony at Bletchley Park for the formal switching on of the recreated Colossus computer. It was a glorious day, attended by about two hundred people, many of whom had worked on code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war. The project is essentially due to one person, Tony Sale, who is I'm sure uniquely qualified for such a project. He was for many years with M.I.5 (including a period as technical assistant to Peter Wright, of "Spycatcher" fame/notoriety) and so has a very high security clearance. He is expert on ancient electronics, he was for several years a Senior Curator at the Science Museum, London, (where he led the project which got a Ferranti Pegasus and an early Elliott computer operational again) and he has an unbelievable ability to get things done. The document attached below is the press briefing for yesterday's ceremony.

The recreated Colossus is remarkably authentic, though not yet finished. (It was in fact complete enough to read encrypted messages from the 5000 character per second paper tape, do some basic processing using an electronic version of the Lorenz (Tunny) rotors, and output counts onto an electromechanical typewriter == all very impressive. There are also a whole series of rooms in which the various aspects of the wartime work, from radio interception, through to processing and indexing the results of the codebreaking, are portrayed and explained.

When I succeeded in getting the Colossus partly declassified, and some photographs of it released, I never dreamt that, over twenty years later, I would actually see a real = albeit recreated = one!

Cheers

Brian

PS You will find a home page for the Colossus Rebuild Project at:

http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/CCC/BPark/colossus