In 1938, England's best mathematicians and scientists were asked to develop a way to crack the Enigma, the code used by the Germans to communicate wartime intelligence.
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Its successor, Colossus II, went into operation on June 1, 1944, just in time to intercept a coded message which confirmed that Adolf Hitler and the German high command had fallen for an Allied ruse suggesting that the long expected cross-channel invasion was aimed at the Calais area, rather than the Normandy beaches.
Armed with this knowledge, supreme Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower forged ahead with plans for Operation Overlord and on June 6, the western Allies landed at Normandy in the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Last week, the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, England, officially declassified its documentation of the Colossus project, releasing a two-volume report to the Public Record Office, the national archive for the entire United Kingdom.
Based on plans developed by a 26-year-old mathematician named Alan Turing, Colossus changed the course of World War II and established the groundwork for modern computers, said John Dinsdale, a retired professor of World War I and II history who, inspired by the story of Colossus, now studies the history of technology.
"The men who worked on the Colossus project would no doubt be called hackers today," Dinsdale said.
"Like all good hackers they used their wit and wile and found a backdoor that gave them access to some very crucial information. In fact, you could say they developed a way to remotely read the mind of Adolf Hitler," he added.
Turing had already developed plans for what he called an "electronic brain," a machine that could do high-level mathematics, when he was recruited for the code-cracking project, Dinsdale said.
"And as it turned out, Turing's machine was also perfectly suited to breaking the Germans' binary-based Enigma code."
Dinsdale said Colossus was not a true computer by today's standards -- "more of a revved-up calculator" -- but it could factor logical problems and was programmable to some degree.
The Colossus project has long been an "open" secret, well known to anyone interested in computer history, said Ian Foley, a London network manager.
Foley remembers reading about the Colossus computers when he was in school during the 1970s -- "Not the full technical specs, mind you, but just the background on the project."
The Colossus project was headquartered at Bletchley Park, which is now open to the public. Bletchley has a working reconstruction of Colossus.
"The Colossus rebuild was done several years back by a brilliant gentleman named Tony Sales," Foley said. "He sorted out how to reassemble the machine from the few scraps of technical information he could lay his hands on."
Foley said that he recently asked Sales if he wished that he'd waited to start work on the reconstruction until the report had been released.
"I noted that it certainly would have been an easier job if he'd had all the specifications to hand. But Sales said no, not really. He'd appreciated the challenge."
Sales was unavailable for comment.
According to a spokeswoman from the British Public Record Office, the 500-page Colossus report features detailed specifications, design notes and photographs of Colossus and Colossus II. It is not yet available online but is expected to be uploaded by the end of October.
Despite the widespread general knowledge of the Colossus project, the British government had carefully shielded all information about the technical details.
By law, the vast majority of British records that are selected for permanent preservation must be made available to the public when the records are 30 years old, a PRO spokeswoman said.
But some records can be legally kept classified for as long as 100 years, depending on the information's possible impact on national security or international relations, the spokeswoman said.
Due to the British government's refusal to release technical information about Colossus project, there is a bit of an international tussle over whether the British or Americans should be credited with developing the first electronic digital computer.
Technology historian David Fleps of Rutgers University says that "on the record" credit goes to the Yanks' ENIAC machine, which was up and running in 1946.
But Fleps also notes that Colossus II not only was operational before the ENIAC, but was also able to process more data.
"When the credit was being handed out, the British government chose to remain silent about the Colossus. It's believed that they wanted to continue to use it during the Korean War, and so they didn't want attention drawn to the project," Fleps said.
It wasn't until the 1970s that any information at all about the Colossus project was declassified -- too late for many of the Colossus developers to get any credit for what they had accomplished.
"It is a rather sad story, from the human side," Fleps said.
After the war ended, Turing continued to work on further development of his "electronic brain" until he was arrested in 1952 and lost his top-level security clearance.
Charged with committing "homosexual acts," Turing was sentenced to undergo a series of estrogen injections that were intended to subdue his sexual cravings.
He killed himself with a cyanide overdose in 1954.
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