Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by timrichard 2926 days ago
> after the war when the Allies were writing history alone for a few years.

British machinery like Colossus was still kept a closely guarded secret until the mid 1970s.

3 comments

The machinery was secret, but the lessons learned quietly trickled out. Newman, Flowers and Turing couldn't talk about what they did at Bletchley, but they made substantial contributions to the development of computers in the post-war years.
And thus also the contribution of people like Kilburn, featured rather sadly in a BBC documentary and particularly relevant here, with many in a similar boat.
And still being used until quite late on :-) we sold a lot of countries surplus enigma machines