158 | 14 TUNNy: HITlER’S BIGGEST fISH
At the time the Colossi were dismantled, news was leaking out about another electronic
computer that was being built in America. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer) was the brainchild of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, two engineering visionar-
ies who were commissioned by the United States Army to build a high-speed calculator.^18 The
Army wanted this for the mammoth job of preparing complex tables that gunners needed to
aim artillery. Construction got under way in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania,
and ENIAC eventually went into operation at the end of 1945, almost two years after the first
Colossus. Flowers himself saw ENIAC shortly after the end of the war. Colossus, with its elabo-
rate facilities for logical operations, was he said ‘much more of a computer than ENIAC’.^19
While Colossus remained cloaked in secrecy, ENIAC became public knowledge in 1946,
and was trumpeted as the first electronic computer. John von Neumann—wholly unaware of
Colossus—told the world, in his prominent scientific writings and charismatic public addresses,
that ENIAC was ‘the first electronic computing machine’.^20 Secrecy about Flowers’ achievement
still bedevils the history of computing even today. The myth that ENIAC was first became set in
stone soon after the war, and for the rest of the twentieth century book after book—not to men-
tion magazines and newspapers—told readers that ENIAC was the first electronic computer.
An influential textbook for computer science students gave this woefully inaccurate historical
summary: ‘The early story has often been told, starting with Babbage [and] up to the birth of
electronic machines with ENIAC’.^21
Flowers was simply left out of the picture. It was monstrously unfair, although inevitable
given the secrecy. In later life, Flowers became tinged with bitterness:
When after the war ended I was told that the secret of Colossus was to be kept indefinitely I
was naturally disappointed . . . I was in no doubt, once it was a proven success, that Colossus was
an historic breakthrough, and that publication would have made my name in scientific and engi-
neering circles—a conviction confirmed by the reception accorded to ENIAC . . . I had to endure
all the acclaim given to that enterprise without being able to disclose that I had anticipated it.
Worse still, his views on electronic engineering carried little weight with his colleagues, who
had no idea what he had achieved, and he gained a reputation for ‘pretentiousness’, he said:
Matters would have been different, I am sure, both for myself and for British industry, if Colossus
had been revealed even ten years after the war ended.
One day Flowers called Ken Myers into his Dollis Hill office.^22 Myers had worked with him
on Colossus from the very beginning, and had been there at Bletchley Park on that historic
day in 1944 when the first of the gigantic computers was delivered. Flowers gestured towards
his office safe. That was where he kept all his papers and records about Colossus, including his
blueprints. He told Myers in his quiet way that instructions had come from on high to destroy
all the documents without trace. The two men carried armloads of paper to a ground floor
workshop where there was a coal stove for heating. Myers told me, ‘I stood there with him and
we burned it all’.
Next—the universal Turing machine in hardware
Colossus was far from being a universal machine. As Jack Good explained to me, even long
multiplication—unnecessary for Tunny-breaking—was found to be just beyond the computer’s