Colossus - The first computer

11:07 mareku 0 Comments

At Betchley Park you can have a look at Colossus, the world's first electronic, digital, programmable computer. It was used to try to decipher German coding during WWII. It has taken nearly fifteen years to rebuild it and is using (then) state-of-the-art vacuum tubes (thermionic valves), thyratrons and photomultipliers to optically read a paper tape and then applied a programmable logical function to every character, counting how often this function returned "true". It can proces 5,000 characters per second. (your iPhone millions)