The Computer that Saved the Free World

It was big, clunky, and had none of the sleek design elements of today’s laptops. But Colossus, a computer built in the mid 1940’s, played an important role in history—and may possibly have saved lives.

Colossus was created by a team of code breakers at Bletchley Park, then the base of England’s military intelligence units. It was designed by the Allied Forces to help figure out the radio transmissions of the Nazis, which were naturally cloaked behind heavy code.

Equipped with powerful software (at least for that time), it deciphered the Nazi code within minutes, and helped swing the war in favor of the Allies. Hitler never knew what hit him, and was never successful in creating a machine to decode our codes.