Germans crack the Colossus

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01/12/2007

Code-crackers in one reincarnation or another have been around for decades. Take the geeks who thrived during the wars, intercepting and decoding encrypted radio messages from enemy nations. In a recent Cipher Challenge organized by the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, radio enthusiasts around the world were up against the recently rebuilt Colossus which was first used during World War II to decipher messages. The original Colossus, arguably the world’s first programmable digital electronic computing device was used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German messages during the war. In this year’s competition, the Germans had the last laugh when their team beat the British.

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