Tony Sale honoured by The Open University for his work on Colossus
1 July 2009
Tony Sale, a director and trustee of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by The Open University for his work on the rebuilding of Colossus, the wartime code-breaking computer.
Tony’s enthusiasm, foresight and stamina together with his engineering and detection skills were highlighted in the citation at The Open University graduation ceremony in Milton Keynes Theatre last week:
“Tony Sale is a gifted and creative engineer, but more than this we honour his great engineering achievements, his leadership and energy. Bletchley Park was a piece of history that nearly disappeared. The efforts of Tony Sale were key to the hard-won battle to keep it alive.”
In receiving his doctorate Tony Sale paid tribute to the Colossus rebuild team and to the original codebreakers:
“This honour is also a recognition of the voluntary work done by over 20 colleagues and friends in helping me over the past 15 years in the rebuild of the World War II Colossus Mk 2 computer in Bletchley Park. The breaking of the German Lorenz SZ42 cipher by Colossus and by the human teams in Bletchley Park in World War II was a fantastic achievement which still challenges modern software practitioners and which provides a salutary lesson in security for aspiring security experts.”
Colossus, the world’s first electronic programmable computer, was used to decode German High Command signals from the Lorenz encryption machine during World War II. The success of Colossus is believed to have shortened the war by many months and saved tens of thousands of lives. Until the 1970s, the activities of Colossus were kept secret, but then reports of its existence and role began to be released into the public domain.
By 1994, the twelve Colossi had been dismantled and only fragments of information existed about them. With a few photographs and diagrams and the memories of a few people, Tony Sale led a team of more than 20 people to rebuild a Colossus Mark II. By 2004 a working Colossus was put on public display and today it is a key exhibit at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, where it stands on its original site and commemorates the remarkable achievements of war-time codebreakers.
About The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park
The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, an independent charity, houses the largest collection of functional historic computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic programmable computer.
The Museum complements the Bletchley Park Trust’s story of codebreaking up to the Colossus and allows visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of the 1940s through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s. New working exhibits are regularly unveiled and the public can view a rebuilt and fully operational Colossus, a working ICL 2900, one of the workhorse mainframes computers of the 1980s, a slide rule display with devices dating back centuries, and many of the earliest desktops of the 1980s and 1990s in the newly-opened PC Gallery.
The Museum is currently open on Thursdays and Saturdays from 1pm, and on bank Holidays in spring and summer. Groups may visit at other times by arrangement.
For more information, see www.tnmoc.org
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