The British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has released further details to mark the 80th birthday of the "Colossus," also known as "the first ever digital computer." The machine was able to "read Hitler's mind," as the obituary of MI5's chief scientist who helped rebuild it puts it.

Although there were no superpowers in the 1940s, the Colossus was an integral part of World War II and a breakthrough in technology in general. For this reason, it was treated as top secret for 56 years indeed, and the original was destroyed by Winston Churchill after the war. However, after the war, Winston Churchill ordered that the original be destroyed. Nevertheless, information has remained relatively limited to the present day.

Notably, Colossus was not just one computer, but an array of computers. Designed to help decipher teleprinter messages, the Colossus was considered "the first [computer] that was digital, programmable, and electronic," but it could not store programs. Therefore, it would probably not be able to run Doom.

Instead, encrypted messages were sent to Colossus via paper tape, which Colossus could read at "5000 characters per second." The computer's specifications included a ring of neon gas valves that could store a whopping one bit of information, "arranged in exact numbers to mimic the wheel of the Lorenz encryption machine: ...... Once the pattern of ones and zeros on the wheel was known, they could be stored in the silotron ring and used to find the correct setting for some messages."

SSD eats your mind.

Most fascinating to me are the logic gates. You may not know this, but computers use logic gates for many of their more complex functions. These gates can output 0s or 1s (think binary code) and are chained together to perform more complex tasks. [Colossus had this, but it was not made with electronic circuits, but with vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes, which conduct current from a cathode to an anode in a vacuum, were used, 2,500 of them to be exact.

The machine itself also served to confirm that D-Day was still underway; as GCHQ writes, "Planning for the D-Day landings was well underway by the time the COLOSSUS was introduced, but it was not until Hitler was convinced that the Allied forces would invade from the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy It was one of the machines that helped generate the information that Hitler had succeeded in convincing himself that the Allies would begin their invasion from Pas de Calais rather than Normandy."[11 [The grandfather of the programmable digital computer was a two-foot-tall beast that was programmed with switches and neon gas and gave instructions on paper.