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During World War II, Alan Turing (inventor of the Turing Machine) worked as a cryptographer, decoding codes and ciphers at one of the British government's top-secret establishments located at Bletchley Park. In January 1943, along with a number of colleagues, Turing began to construct an electronic machine to decode the Geheimfernschreiber cipher. This machine, which they dubbed COLOSSUS, comprised 1,800 vacuum tubes and was completed and working by December of the same year! By any standards COLOSSUS was one of the world's earliest working programmable electronic digital computers. But it was a special-purpose machine that was really only suited to a narrow range of tasks (for example, it was not capable of performing decimal multiplications). Having said that, although COLOSSUS was built as a special-purpose computer, it did prove flexible enough to be programmed to execute a variety of different routines. a

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10y ago

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