[SIGCIS-Members] Royal Mail issues Colossus stamp

[Brian Randell]

Hi:

The Royal Mail’s own press release about their Colossus stamp is now at last available, at:

 http://www.royalmailgroup.com/royal-mail-commemorates-colossus-giant-achievement-code-breaking

The summary section of its text is as follows:

> 	• Royal Mail has issued a stamp to commemorate Colossus - the world’s first electronic, digital and programmable computer.  This is part of the Inventive Britain Special Stamps issued on 19 February 2015
> 	• The stamps are on sale now from Royal Mail by phone on 03457 641 641 or from www.royalmail.com/inventivebritain and available from 8,000 Post Offices nationwide
> 	• The Colossus machine was designed and built by General Post Office (GPO) employee Tommy Flowers MBE and his team at the GPO Research Station in Dollis Hill, north-west London, during the Second World War to decipher messages being sent between German High Command
> 	• These messages used a more advanced cipher machine, called Lorenz, than those from the Enigma machine that Alan Turing OBE decoded using his Bombe machine
> 	• The first Colossus machine was completed in December 1943 and it became operational at Bletchley Park in February 1944.  A total of 10 machines were in use by the end of the war
> 	• Most of the original machines were dismantled after the war, and all involved with Colossus were sworn to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act. 
> 	• Full information was only declassified by the British Government in 2000, two years after Flowers’ death in October 1998
> 	• A fully functioning rebuild of Colossus was completed in 2007. It is now on display in The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park
> 	• The site of the old GPO Research Station was converted into flats, and has an access road named Flowers Close in honour of Tommy Flowers 

Cheers

Brian Randell

--
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk   PHONE = +44 191 208 7923
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