ERNIE
Tommy Flowers published which notable work from 1957 to 1958?
Tommy Flowers Thomas Harold Flowers , BSc , DSc , OBE ( 22 December 1905 – 28 October 1998 ) was an English engineer with the British General Post Office . During World War II , Flowers designed and built Colossus , the worlds first programmable electronic computer , to help solve encrypted German messages . Early life . Flowers was born at 160 Abbott Road , Poplar in Londons East End on 22 December 1905 , the son of a bricklayer . Whilst undertaking an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering at the Royal Arsenal , Woolwich , he took evening classes at the University of London to earn a degree in electrical engineering . In 1926 , he joined the telecommunications branch of the General Post Office ( GPO ) , moving to work at the research station at Dollis Hill in north-west London in 1930 . In 1935 , he married Eileen Margaret Green and the couple later had two children , John and Kenneth . From 1935 onward , he explored the use of electronics for telephone exchanges and by 1939 , he was convinced that an all-electronic system was possible . A background in switching electronics would prove crucial for his computer designs . World War II . Flowers first contact with wartime codebreaking came in February 1941 when his director , W . Gordon Radley , was asked for help by Alan Turing , who was working at Bletchley Park the government codebreaking establishment , north west of London in Buckinghamshire . Turing wanted Flowers to build a decoder for the relay-based Bombe machine , which Turing had developed to help decrypt German Enigma codes . The decoder project was abandoned but Turing was impressed with Flowerss work , and in February 1943 introduced him to Max Newman who was leading the effort to automate part of the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher . This was a high-level German code generated by a teletypewriter in-line cipher machine , the Lorenz SZ40/42 , one of their ( secret writer ) systems , called Tunny ( tuna fish ) by the British . It was a much more complex system than Enigma ; the decoding procedure involved trying so many possibilities that it was impractical to do by hand . Flowers and Frank Morrell ( also at Dollis Hill ) designed the Heath Robinson , in an attempt to automate the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz SZ-40/42 cipher machine . Flowers proposed a more sophisticated alternative , using an electronic system , which his staff called Colossus , using perhaps 1,800 thermionic valves ( vacuum tubes ) instead of 150 and having only one paper tape instead of two ( which required synchronisation ) by generating the wheel patterns electronically . Because the most complicated previous electronic device had used about 150 valves , some were sceptical that the system would be reliable . Flowers countered that the British telephone system used thousands of valves and was reliable because the electronics were operated in a stable environment with the circuitry on all the time . The Bletchley management were not convinced and merely encouraged Flowers to proceed on his own . He did so at the Post Office Research Labs , using some of his own funds to build it . Despite the success of Colossus , the Heath Robinson approach was still valuable for solving certain problems . The final development of the concept was a machine called Super Robinson that was designed by Tommy Flowers . This one could run four tapes and was used for running depths and cribs or known-plaintext attack runs . Flowers gained full backing for his project from the director of the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill , W . G . Radley . With the highest priority for acquisition of parts , Flowerss team at Dollis Hill built the first machine in eleven months . It was immediately dubbed Colossus by the Bletchley Park staff for its immense proportions . The Mark 1 Colossus operated five times faster and was more flexible than the previous system , named Heath Robinson , which used electro-mechanical switches . The first Mark 1 , with 1500 valves , ran at Dollis Hill in November 1943 ; it was delivered to Bletchley Park in January 1944 where it was assembled and began operation in early February . The algorithms used by Colossus were developed by W . T . Tutte and his team of mathematicians . Colossus proved to be efficient and quick against the twelve-rotor Lorenz cipher SZ42 machine . In anticipation of a need for additional computers , Flowers was already working on Colossus Mark 2 which would employ 2,400 valves . The first Mark 2 went into service at Bletchley Park on 1 June 1944 and immediately produced vital information for the imminent D-Day landings planned for Monday 5 June ( postponed 24 hours by bad weather ) . Flowers later described a crucial meeting between Dwight D . Eisenhower and his staff on 5 June , during which a courier entered and handed Eisenhower a note summarising a Colossus decrypt . This confirmed that Adolf Hitler wanted no additional troops moved to Normandy , as he was still convinced that the preparations for the Normandy landings were a feint . Handing back the decrypt , Eisenhower announced to his staff , We go tomorrow . Earlier , a report from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel on the western defences was decoded by Colossus and revealed that one of the sites chosen as the drop site for a US parachute division was the base for a German tank division , so the site was changed . Years later , Flowers described the design and construction of the computers . Ten Colossi were completed and used during the Second World War in British decoding efforts and an eleventh was ready for commissioning at the end of the war . All but two were dismantled at the end of the war , The remaining two were moved to a British Intelligence department , GCHQ in Cheltenham , Gloucestershire , where they may have played a significant part in the codebreaking operations of the Cold War . They were finally decommissioned in 1959 and 1960 . A functioning Colossus Mark II was rebuilt by a team of volunteers led by Tony Sale between 1993 and 2008 . It is on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park . Post-war work and retirement . After the war , Flowers received little recognition for his contribution to cryptanalysis . The government granted him £1,000 payment which did not cover Flowers personal investment in the equipment ; he shared much of the money amongst the staff who had helped him build and test Colossus . Flowers applied for a loan from the Bank of England to build another machine like Colossus but was denied the loan because the bank did not believe that such a machine could work . He could not argue that he had already designed and built many of these machines because his work on Colossus was covered by the Official Secrets Act . It was not until the 1970s that Flowers work in computing was fully acknowledged . His family had known only that he had done some secret and important work . He remained at the Post Office Research Station where he was Head of the Switching Division . He and his group pioneered work on all-electronic telephone exchanges , completing a basic design by about 1950 , which led on to the Highgate Wood Telephone Exchange . He was also involved in the development of ERNIE . In 1964 , he became head of the advanced development at Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd. , where he continued to develop electronic telephone switching including a pulse amplitude modulation exchange , retiring in 1969 . In 1976 , he published Introduction to Exchange Systems , a book on the engineering principles of telephone exchanges . In 1977 , Flowers was made an honorary Doctor of Science by Newcastle University . In 1980 , he was the first winner of the Martlesham Medal in recognition of his achievements in computing . In 1993 , he received a certificate from , having completed a basic course in information processing on a personal computer . Flowers died in 1998 aged 92 , leaving a wife and two sons . He is commemorated at the Post Office Research Station site , which became a housing development , with the main building converted into a block of flats and an access road called Flowers Close . He was honoured by London Borough of Tower Hamlets , where he was born . An Information and Communications Technology ( ICT ) centre for young people , the Tommy Flowers Centre , opened there in November 2010 . The centre has closed but the building is now the Tommy Flowers Centre , part of the Tower Hamlets Pupil Referral Unit . In September 2012 , his wartime diary was put on display at Bletchley Park . A road in Kesgrave , near the current BT Research Laboratories , is named Tommy Flowers Drive . On 12 December 2013 , 70 years after he created Colossus , his legacy was honoured with a memorial commissioned by BT , successor to Post Office Telephones . The life-size bronze bust , designed by James Butler , was unveiled by Trevor Baylis at Adastral Park , BTs research and development centre in Martlesham Heath , near Ipswich , Suffolk . BT also began a computer science scholarship and award in his name . On 29 September 2016 , BT opened the Tommy Flowers Institute for ICT training at Adastral Park to support the development of postgraduates transferring into industry . The institute focuses on bringing ICT-sector organisations together with academic researchers to solve some of the challenges facing UK businesses , exploring areas such as cybersecurity , big data , autonomics and converged networks . The launch event was attended by professors from Cambridge , Oxford , East Anglia , Essex , Imperial , UCL , Southampton , Surrey , and Lancaster as well as representatives from the National Physical Laboratory , Huawei , Ericsson , CISCO , ARM and ADVA . In 2018 , a room in the newly refurbished Institution of Engineering and Technology in London was named the Flowers Room .