#bpark the back view of Colossus - 2,500 valves! 

Stephen Fry

I remember Tommy Flowers pitched his design to the military. When he said it would take a few years to build they turned him down, after all the war would be over by Christmas. Luckily he continued to build it anyway.

The also thought that all those valves would fail too often, but that's only a problem if you keep turning them on and off, if you leave them on they are very reliable.

I loved my visit there, although I also found it quite depressing because it made me feel a bit thick.

http://mrpmorris.blogspot.com/2007/09/mr-thicko-thicky-thickpants.html

Funnily enugh I think the name of that blog post came from an episode of Blackadder :-)

I remember valve radio and TV - must have been able to get loads of channels on that thing...

yep, that's what my father worked on

Does anyone make those valves any longer? They look like 6L6gs. Ah, back in the day...

Glad to see Colossus still standing. I believed it had been destroyed to save money.

it's got a bug, better get the fly spray

what does this button do ???

We just got rid of a computer about that bulky... ludites or tight?

Don't make them like that anymore!

Stephen Fry ach sod the comparisons to today's computers - that is just a beautiful thing in it's own right

WOW that really is superbly super cool

Just amazing! Surprised there's only one fan visible pointing at those two big panels.

Looking at this reminded me of when I was a child and my father had valved radios and then ultimately some of the first valved tv's around the house all waiting for repair (He was a qualified electrical engineer in the Royal Signals at the time when Bletchley was built).

Stephen Fry ... each summer we need to get the fans out in the computer room at the college. Like I said before, if you take it all in - for what it represents - extremely impressive!!

Tommy Flowers was one of the key members of the team that made all those valves work.

I always said that digital systems weren't anything like as good as analogue systems! Oh! - or maybe that was about sound! :-) And it gives 'watching the tube' a whole new meaning! Glass of wine anyone?

Gosh! Got to be the warmest and brightest room in Bletchley – Compare this to this "supercomputer" http://tinyurl.com/q27wys and it's amazing at just how far computers have advanced. More info on colossus if interested: http://tinyurl.com/2groow

ahhhh good times... when computers were real work.

It certainly does give off heat. When we ran the Colossus cipher Challenge http://www.tnmoc.org/videos-cipher.aspx there was no need to turn on the heating each frosty morning. Turning on Colossus did the trick! BTW, you can sponsor a valve on Colossus to help The National Museum of Computing: http://www.colossusonline.org/

I like the cooling Fan, Ha, ha

Now that's what computers SHOULD look like!