[Cryptography] RIP Tommy Flowers

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>

| We lost Tommy Flowers MBE,

Apparently he got his MBE in 1943.  I wonder if the award was secret then.

| designer of Colossus (and possibly the world's 
| first digital computer[*]) in 1998.
| [*]
| Some like to boast that ENIAC was first, but only because Colossus was 
| kept a massive secret.

It's all a matter of definitions and qualifications.  One could argue
that the abacus (and precursors) were digital computers.

Perhaps you feel that a computer needs a program.  I don't really know
the whether the Colossus' tape was what we'd consider a program.

Perhaps you meant to add "electronic".

And why not one of Zuse's machines?  Or Atanasoff's?

|  He served at Bletchley Park in WW-2, 

I thought he was at Dollis Hill.

| beavering away on the Nazi Enigma code, which pretty much shaved a couple 
| of years off the war.

I've always wondered how one could come up with a meaningful figure.

In any case, just imagine how much shorter the war would have been if the 
Allies had widely used systems half as good as Enigma.  Read, for example, 
Marks' "Between silk and cyanide" to see how bad it was (recommended to me 
by Hugh Daniel RIP, former member of this list). Another example: if I 
remember correctly, codes used by Allied shipping were always broken by 
the time they were deployed.