please empty your brain below

I friend of mine helps with the computing display at Bletchley Park. A real computer "nerd" he moved home from Sutton to the Bletchley Park area just to be close by his beloved old computers. Their's devotion for you!
When they were rebuilding Colossus they put out an appeal for electronic valves, and would still like to add to their reserve stocks, so if you have any EF37,EF36, EF37A, 6J6, 6V6 and GT1C valves (tubes u.s.a. )and you do not need them they would appreciate them.
Valves by the way are still manufactured, low production runs for valve types used in a few "HiFi" amplifiers where some enthusiasts think that valves give a better sound than solid state equipment.

Oh yeah. This old chestnut again. Whilst fascinated by the subject (I visited Bletchley Park three times so far) and not wishing to decry the wonderful achievements of my hero, Alan Turing, we yet again have this nonsense about a British first etc.

Just as the Germans were years ahead in the invention of Radar, the Nazi doctors had discovered the causal link between cancer and smoking decades before Professor Richard Doll (which is why Hitler was so anti-smoking), they were well ahead in the development of Computing.

Fortunately for us Hitler showed little interest in long term projects to assist the war (because blitzkrieg would render them unnecessary) and computing in particular (probably because probably because he couldn't understand the concept) and so the great computer pioneering work of Konrad Zuse prior to anything done at Bletchley Park is largely forgotten.


Pedantic of Purley
Beat me to it the Germans had built computers long before the British.
Konrad Zuse Z1 1936 to the Z3 in 1941, again as Pedantic of Purley points out Hitler did not see any real use for the computer.

I've described Colossus as "the world's very first digital programmable computer". I think the key German-beating word there is "digital".

I am very willing to stand corrected but I believe that the Zuse Z2 built 1939 was also digital. I got the impression when visiting the Berlin Science Museum that Zuse was always ahead of us when it comes down to being first but then maybe I have been taken in by German Propaganda!

Of course you could argue that the German development was irrelevant because ultimately it did not advance the development of computers. Unfotunately this is even more true about the work done at Bletchley Park because the machines were destroyed and the developments kept secret on Churchill's orders.

What Bletchley Park achieved was remarkable but we should put it in perspective. We weren't even the first to break the enigma code. Three Polish mathematicians had done that years previously and Bletchley Park built on that work. There names are largely forgotten which serves them right for having such unpronouncable names.

The Bletchley Park tour gave those three Polish Enigma-cracking mathematicians full credit, which was nice.

As for the first computer, perhaps this Wikipedia table will shed some light. It does sound as if there were several first computers, each of subtly different standing.

Both the Colossus and the Zuse Z3 were digital computers.

To my knowledge, the actual difference is that the Colussus was using valves and therefore was a digital programmable *electronic* computer and very likely to be the first of its kind, while the Z3 was electromechanical.

Is there a museum of museums?


The mechanical bits-and-bobs may have been the brainchild of Tommy Flowers, but the actual theory and computing solution came from Alan Turing, a genius of the first calibre.

As a reward for his services, he was pilloried, stripped of his Security Clearance, subjected to chemical castration and eventually committed suicide. I forgot to add, he was a homosexual, and as such not a fit person to mix with 'ordinary people'!











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