By Steve Ranger, 20 March 2008 12:44
COMMENT
It's some old news that has me fascinated this week. Really old news. Ancient even.
silicon.com has been to visit Bletchley Park, home of the World War II codebreakers and Colossus - the world's first electronic codebreaking machine - which smashed the codes used by the German Enigma machine.
You can see some of the photos of Bletchley and the Colossus here and there's a fascinating video starring a rebuilt Colossus and the man who rebuilt it, which I'd also urge you to watch.
It's a fascinating story - that we built a computer so high-powered and so secret that after the war it had to be destroyed and the blueprints burnt in a furnace.
And yet it seems to me the effects of this post-war secrecy still linger on, so low is the general recognition of these pioneers.
It seems astonishing to me that this work is not recognised more widely. And even worse, that we are at constant risk of losing some of our technology heritage forever.
Too much of our computing history has already ended up in the dustbin or the skip, I fear, dumped when the shiny new model turned up.
What is junk one day may just a few years later be recognised as a vital link in the evolution of the technology infrastructure that now surrounds us. But sadly by then it is too late.
I for one would like to see much more funding made available to protect this heritage. Perhaps just as the listing of buildings has become a way of protecting the gems of our built environment I'd like to see the listing - for want of a better word - of the gems of computing that should not be forgotten.
The tech world is so often about chasing the newest innovation - but we forget our history at our peril.
Editor's choice - three things you must check out on silicon.com this week:
Another great piece of silicon.com video this week, looking at the cutting edge baggage systems at Heathrow Terminal 5. Alternatively, find out what BlackBerry's top exec in Europe thinks of the iPhone. And if that's not enough, here are some tips on stopping data leaks in our Data Lockdown special report.
Comments
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1. Barry Sumner
I would love to see a computer and electronics museum located in the UK – how about some lottery funding Mr Brown? I remember working on gems such as DEC’s PDP-8s, PDP-11s, VAXs and Alphas. The engineering ethos was superb and their operating systems didn’t crash, unlike Microsoft products.
To my mind, everything the industry raves about today had its seeds back with DEC or Sun - NAS and SAN readily come to mind.
This was the era when a high level of electronic and mechanical acumen was demanded to work on such systems and highly disciplined software engineers created applications that ran with very limited resources - gone are the days when engineering skills were prized, giving way to the era of the ‘next lorry load of tin to arrive’.
2. anonymous
Well said, Steve.
How many BBC Model Bs are still in existence, or ZX80s or ZX81s?
These were cutting edge at one time, so must be forgotten...
And it is about time the government released more info about Colossus et al. What we did 60 years ago shouldn't be secret now.
3. Richard Sarson
It wasn't just Colossus. After the war, came the UMIST-Ferranti Mercury and later Atlas, and the Cambridge-Joe Lyons LEO, the first business computer in the world.
All this was done quickly because the academics and engineers who built them all worked together at Bletchley Park or the Royal Radar establishment at Malvern.
There was none of today's gulf between computer science departments in universities, whose end-products are learned papers, and hardware and software firms. In those days, the time-lag between theory and product was about five minutes. We had a war to win.
Last week I went to a conference at the Royal Society, where academics were talking of a 15-year gap between theory and practice. Seriously.
In the 1940s and 1950s, great men roamed the earth. Today's pygmies should be told about them.