The teamwork behind the Bletchley Park supercomputer | computing

Andrew Smith is right to praise Tommy Flowers’ work to build Colossus, the world’s first programmable digital computer, delivered to Bletchley Park in 1944 (Move over, Alan Turing: Meet the working-class Bletchley Park hero you don’t see in the movies, October 12). The article concludes with Flowers asserting that “there is never one person in one place” – teamwork and collaboration are key. This is more true than the article might suggest, when it says that “later models” of the Colossus “incorporated many new features and innovations,” as if these were the result of Flowers working alone, merely updating his design. Quite the opposite.

It is well documented (for example, in the 2006 book Colossus by B Jack Copeland and others) that Bletchley Park codebreakers Jack Good and Donald Michie not only used the Colossus to help break codes, they improved the computer; It was these developments that were successfully incorporated by Flowers into subsequent devices.

This was a teamwork between engineer Flowers and the codebreakers, who came from a range of disciplines, from mathematics to the humanities. Hence the need to teach the full range of subject areas, rather than what may seem most useful.

But this goes beyond the importance of teamwork. It is dramatic evidence that it is completely wrong to believe that new machine Hence the need to go beyond just training in today’s skills. We need people with the abilities to work with new technologies they have never encountered before, let alone the “skill” at them, and the motivation to put those abilities to good use. This is why we need lifelong learning on a massive scale as a permanent national imperative.
Professor Jonathan Michie
Oxford University