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Tommy Flowers built Colossus at Bletchley Park in 1943 to break Lorenz cipher messages. The figure is taken from The National Museum of Computing, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Colossus was the world's first programmable electronic digital computer

Tommy Flowers built Colossus at Bletchley Park in 1943 to break Lorenz cipher messages

Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, Colossus used over 1,500 vacuum tubes to decrypt intercepted high-level Lorenz teleprinter messages used by the German High Command. Operating at Bletchley Park from December 1943, Colossus read paper tape at speeds of 5,000 characters per second. The machines remained secret until military intelligence records were declassified in the 1970s.

Colossus (49759983957) — Mike McBey · CC BY 2.0 · licence · source

Where this comes from

The National Museum of Computing

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Tags: colossus, bletchley-park, cryptography

Colossus was the world's first programmable electronic digital computer: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Tommy Flowers built Colossus at Bletchley Park in 1943 to break Lorenz cipher messages. The figure is taken from The National Museum of Computing, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.