What If: Tommy Flowers

Who: Tommy Flowers was the inventor of the Colossus computer, the computer that broke the German Lorenz cipher during the Second World War. Many people say that Alan Turing invented the computer and cracked the German codes. Well he certainly did design and build computers and indeed did crack codes; however, it was Tommy that did it first for the Lorenz cipher.

Tommy was working for the General Post Office (GPO) as head of telecommunications. He was working on the idea of using valves as automatic switching devices as a replacement for the mechanical switches. The problem with the Lorenz cracking was that two streams of tape needed to be read at the same time in sync. At the time this was incredibly difficult. Tommy had the idea that using valves, he could read a tape in to memory, then read the other on and crack the code. Simple, revolutionary and yet when he took the idea to military, the idea was dismissed. He told them it would take one year to build the machine. The military said there would be little point in building it as the war would be over within a year. This happened in 1943, and despite this outlook from the military, Tommy went ahead and built the device out of his own money. The military then took Colossus, which presumably had to be dismantled and reassembled, and used it to crack the Lorenz cipher. Tommy was sworn to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act and it was only in 1974 that his achievements became known to the world.

There are two "What If's" here:

What If 1: The military had not dismissed the idea and had developed it immediately.

With the resources at the military’s disposal the machine could have been built within the year, probably considerably less, let’s say 6 months. Now the military have a machine that is capable of cracking the Lorenz ciphers, at least 6 months ahead of what was originally possible if not sooner. D-Day would then have come earlier saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

What If 2: Tommy had not been tied to the Official Secrets Act.

Tommy went back to the GPO where he would have developed the modern computer. He would have taken credit as the father of the modern computer along with Colossus instead of Alan Turing and ENIAC. The GPO would have driven this forward and used it in conjunction with their telecommunications network to create a computer network, the "Internet" at least 20 years before ARPANET. How useful this would have been is another issue. Computing and telecommunications would now be 10 to 20 years ahead of where we actually are. So in other words, 1989 would have been, technologically, where we are today.