26 September 2023
Earlier this month, a well-deserved blue plaque was erected at the former Post Office research station at Dollis Hill, London to honour Tommy Flowers designer of the Colossus computer, writes Adrian Murphy.
Tommy was born in 1905 and died in 1998, aged 92, so it was not possible for us to include an interview of him in our archive as we launched in 2015. However, he is the first person mentioned in our History of IT feature, acknowledging his significance in the development of digital computers.
We say that: “During the Second World War, the machines that broke the Enigma codes and helped to end the war were ingenious computers but designed for a specific purpose and not adaptable to other functions.
“Colossus, built for code-breaking (the Lorenz-encrypted ‘Tunny’ messages), was kept secret for many years but ultimately credited as a major step forward. The brainchild of Tommy Flowers, it was the world’s first programmable digital computer, albeit without a stored programme facility.”
However, throughout our archive of 230 interviews and numerous features, there are many mentions of Tommy and Colossus, and one of our interviewees worked alongside him as a teenager.
Professor Peter Dobson OBE, took a scholarship at the GPO in 1961, aged 18,