[pf] world's first large-scale electronic digital computer; Geoffrey Tim

[contains:
  "an account of Colossus, the world's first large-scale electronic digital
computer, installed at Bletchley Park in December 1943. 
The report was written at Bletchley Park in 1945 by three codebreakers,
Jack Good, Donald Michie, and Geoffrey Timms. 
This report was classified until the middle of 2000"  D.]

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· In January, in my:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001I/msg00354.html : "Re: [pf] What lies
behind American arrogance?", of 22 January 2001 18:56 UTC, I wrote:

· My wife's father, Geoffrey Timms, was one of the three "boffins" who
provided a major part of the mathematical background and analysis at
Bletchley Park, southern England, where breaking the Enigma code was
actually done, using what Geoff would have called the world's first
electronic valve computer. Currently Bera is involved in bringing a copy of
a recently-declassified report on all this, here to New Zealand.

· I really object to typical US distortions and sometimes outright lies.

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· In:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001II/msg00283.html : "[pf] intelligence
- more-needed now than in the past", I wrote:

· All of us, and I include non-human living things here (all the others
have to respond, but we can choose, can take the initiative), are facing a
world that will be very noticeably different from what our grandparents
knew. This necessarily means we are and will be facing challenges, where
many of our /traditional/ responses will /not/ lead to the best, or even a
satisfactory answer.
· So intelligence, of the results-focussed, "problem-solving" sort, has a
higher value now and until we get most of the way through this transition
to a sustainable world, than it has been in the past.
  In certain places around the world in the past, at a handful of times,
something similar has existed, but now it is everybody that is affected.
 ...
· Two reasons why I was thinking about these things were:
(1) My wife is currently working on a 400-word biography of her father
Geoffrey Timms who was one of three high-powered mathematical specialists
involved in the Colossus computer project created in Britain for
code-breaking in the 1940s. Although it was most of the time used for this
one task (in which programmes and data were fed in by paper tape), and
therefore has been not called a computer by Americans, Geoff Timms worked
on adapting it to do decimal-number calculations. It was in fact quite a
bit more flexible than its normal use indicated. So I and other regard it
as the first electronic computer (it used tubes).
   This "pushing the boundaries", "finding new solutions to new questions",
and similar, are IMO more necessary now than even 60 years ago.

[Later: ]
· Over an hour ago, under: "intelligence - more-needed now than in the
past" I posted to the Positive Futures list: 
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(1) ... Geoffrey Timms ... was one of three high-powered mathematical
specialists involved in the Colossus computer project created in Britain
for code-breaking in the 1940s.
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· There were many more than 3 such people there; in fact one was Turing
himself. 

· I was thinking only of the three authors of the report on the Colossus
project that was recently de-classified and is available fron the British
Public Records Office.

· If I mislead anyone, I apologise.

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· Now, in mid-December, I can tell you that there is a Turing Archive site:
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/index.html
 which has (link: "Codebreaking in World War II"):

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http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/index/tunnyreportindex.html
  which starts:

  "General Report on Tunny 
   
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This report describes the German Tunny encoding machine and tells the full
story of how the British broke [the] Tunny [cypher] and decoded a steady
stream of messages from Hitler and other members of the German High
Command. It includes an account of Colossus {
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/BriefHis
tofComp.html#Col [all on same line in browser] }, the world's first
large-scale electronic digital computer, installed at Bletchley Park in
December 1943. 
The report was written at Bletchley Park in 1945 by three codebreakers,
Jack Good, Donald Michie, and Geoffrey Timms. 
This report was classified until the middle of 2000, when it was released
to the Public Record Office, Kew (document reference HW 25/4 and HW 25/5).
The links in the table of contents below lead to a digital facsimile of the
entire document.
The original document is Crown Copyright and is reproduced by permission of
the Public Record Office.

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sent to Positive Futures by David MacClement
David MacClement [davd @ ihug.co.nz] (remove spaces)
http://davd.tripod.com/GrAPR-011130.html#top
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
***********************************************

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