The Guardian piece is nicely written, but I sighed a little to see another retelling of the story that adds nothing new. There’s also something ironic in attempting to challenge the long genius myth of Turing by squeezing Flowers himself into the lone genius narrative template as “the real father of computing.”
So as a PSA for the work I did a few years ago with Mark Priestley on this topic, those looking to learn more might consult:
- Contextualizing Colossus. That’s the organizational side of the story in Technology & Culture, based in the archival materials, focused on the relationship between Bletchley Park and Dollis Hill. The clearest effort to pull back from individuals to look at this as an institutional relationship. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763592
- Colossus and Programmability. From IEEE Annals, this one digs in to the questions of whether Colossus was programmable and whether it was a computer. There’s a British stamp that says it was both, but we conclude it was neither. But we couldn’t find an existing definition of “programmable” so we had to grapple with what that even meant at the time. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2018/04/08509146/17D45WgziNe
- Tommy Flowers biography from IEEE Annals. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8356180
- Colossus Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing. One of the my CACM contributions, written in a more general way and also taking aim at the Imitation Game movie. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3018994
- Colossus the Missing Manual. That’s the technical report with the in-depth description of the Colossus architecture, its sequence of operations and what all the controls did. There are also several documented Colossus configurations. https://mediarep.org/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c93-9b09-4fadcc847bd3
Perhaps unsurprisingly the world mostly shrugged at these and went on with the ritual retelling of the story of snubbed genius. It was nice, though, making my first visit to Bletchley Park earlier this year to have the chance to introduce myself to the volunteer Colossus operators who turned out to have been making extensive use of the Missing Manual. Rather a specialized audience, but a committed one!
Best wishes,
Tom
Thomas Haigh
Professor & Chair, UWM History Department
Chair, IEEE Computer Society History Committee
Director, ACM History Committee Turing Awards Project
See more at www.tomandmaria.com/Tom
From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> On Behalf Of Dag Spicer via Members
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2025 12:49 PM
To: members@lists.sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Tommy Flowers
A great story… Flowers’ career was full of brilliant inventions.
| |
Dag
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Dag Spicer
Senior Curator
Computer History Museum
Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
ACM History Committee
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View CA 94043
“History is a vast early warning system.”
— Norman Cousins, American journalist (1915-1990).
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