The Colossus computers were used to help decipher intercepted radio teleprinter messages that had been encrypted using an unknown device. Intelligence information revealed that … 展开

Colossus was developed for the "Newmanry", the section headed by the mathematician Max Newman that was responsible for machine methods against the twelve-rotor Lorenz SZ40/42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine (code-named Tunny, for tunafish). The … 展开

Although the Colossus was the first of the electronic digital machines with programmability, albeit limited by modern standards, it was not a … 展开

A team led by Tony Sale built a fully functional reconstruction of a Colossus Mark 2 between 1993 and 2008. In spite of the blueprints and hardware being destroyed, a surprising amount of material had survived, mainly in engineers' notebooks, but a … 展开

By using differencing and knowing that the psi wheels did not advance with each character, Tutte worked out that trying just two differenced bits (impulses) of the chi-stream against the differenced ciphertext would produce a statistic that was non-random. This became … 展开

The Newmanry was staffed by cryptanalysts, operators from the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) – known as "Wrens" – and engineers … 展开

Howard Campaigne, a mathematician and cryptanalyst from the US Navy's OP-20-G, wrote the following in a foreword to Flowers' 1983 paper "The Design of Colossus".
My view of Colossus was that of cryptanalyst … 展开