Andrew Smith is right to applaud the work of Tommy Flowers for building Colossus, the world’s first digital programmable computer, delivered to Bletchley Park in 1944 (Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies, 12 October). The piece concludes with Flowers stressing: “It’s never just one person in one place” – teamwork and collaboration are key. This is even truer than the article might imply, when it says “subsequent models” of Colossus “included many new features and innovations”, as if these had been the result of Flowers working alone, just upgrading his design. Quite the contrary.
It is well documented (for example, in the 2006 book Colossus by B Jack Copeland and others) that the Bletchley Park codebreakers Jack Good and Donald Michie not only utilised Colossus to help break the codes, they enhanced the computer; it was these developments that were so successfully incorporated by Flowers in subsequent machines.
