A COMPUTER developed during the Second World War to decrypt Nazi coded transmissions yesterday lost to modern technology in a race to decipher a new message sent from the continent.
An amateur cryptographer from Germany who built his own computer programme for the challenge beat the rebuilt Colossus machine to unravel the message, which was sent via Second World War technology.
The exercise was to mark the launch of the Nati
onal Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where Colossus was created in the 1940s.
Colossus, the world's first programmable digital computer, was pitched against more up-to-date rivals to see who could decipher the message, transmitted from Germany on Thursday.
At the same time as the machine, which is the size of a small lorry, was cranking up, amateur code breakers using modern computer equipment also started trying to crack the encrypted text.
Joachim Schuth, a Bonn-based software engineer, cracked the code late on Thursday night.
Colossus eventually completed the challenge at 1:15pm yesterday afternoon, after taking a respectable three hours and 35 minutes, overcoming transmission problems and a blown valve.
Andy Clark, a spokesman for the Bletchley Park museum, said: "We are absolutely delighted with the performance of the Colossus."
The machines were broken up after the end of the war to preserve their secret. Over the past 14 years, experts have painstakingly rebuilt a Colossus Mark II, gleaning information from those involved in the creation of the original.
The 10 Mark II Colossus machines enabled code-breakers at Bletchley to decipher Nazi communications, leading to the war being shortened by many months and saving thousands of lives.
The full article contains 280 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
