Title: Tommy Flowers - Obituary

In view of the recent interest in the work at Bletchley Park I feel it appropriate to publish the following brief remembrance of one of the great computer pioneers. One cost of secret work is that people like Tommy Flowers are not recognised and given the credit they deserve.

Tommy Flowers, who developed a pioneering computer that cracked German military codes in World War II, is dead at 92. Flowers died from heart failure at home in London on Oct. 28.

An engineering graduate of the University of London, Flowers joined the British Post Office, then responsible for all national communications, in the 1930s and experimented in electronic telephone transmissions.

In World War II, he was sent to Bletchley Park, 50 miles from London where mathematicians, cryptographers and other experts worked on breaking German military codes. Flowers secretly developed Colossus, a one-ton machine that was able to unscramble coded messages electronically rather than mechanically as had been done.

"Colossus had all the characteristics of the computer although it wasn't thought of as a computer at the time," Kenneth Flowers said in a telephone interview. "It could think and made decisions. Up to then these machines had been used just to make numerical calculations."

By the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, Flowers had produced another Colossus that worked five times as fast as the original. By the end of the war in 1945, 10 machines were in operation.

Thomas Harold Flowers, who was born in London on Dec. 22, 1905, received an honour, Member of the British Empire, for his work in the 1940s, but remained largely unknown to the wider public because the work was kept secret until the '70s.

After the war, he returned to the post office and tried to persuade his superiors to use technology to produce an all-electronic phone system.

"He spent 20 years trying to persuade them, but he wasn't so successful because he couldn't tell them he had already produced the machine," Kenneth Flowers said.

He did not tell his own family of his achievement and the many lives it saved until long after the war.

"He told us he worked on something secret and important," his son said. "They were allowed to tell that much in case their wives wondered where they were. But until the '70s he never said anything else. It was a point of honour really."

Bletchley Park is now a tourist attraction with a replica of the Colossus.

In addition to Kenneth, Flowers is survived by his wife, Eileen, son John, and three grandchildren.

The funeral was to be held Monday at Hendon Crematorium in north London.