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-achieve... 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@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell