colossus printed out the current count only if it exceeded the set total there was also a feature for suspending counting and incrementing of the key sequence circuits if a second count needed to be printed before the printer had finished these are both quite clearly conditional branching the atanasoff berry computer is usually described as being designed only for the solution of systems of linear equations colossus on the other hand could perform a wide variety of tasks to help with decrypting tunny messages these ranged from implementing tutte's break in to performing a frequency count of the characters in a delta de chi