Tommy Flowers, Quantum Computers and Colossus

Tommy Flowers, Quantum Computers and Colossus

I did my lecture on public key encryption yesterday, and I made a mistake. No, it wasn’t in the maths of the public key methods or in the coding, it was that I said that public key encryption was invited by three researchers from the US: Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA). But, I quickly corrected myself and outlined that it was also invented by Clifford Cocks (from GCHQ).

And, so, who better to tell a bit of history about public key encryption and also about our quantum future than Professor Alan Woodward? So, here’s Alan discussing Tommy Flowers, Colossus, Richard Feynman, Logica, FORTRAN, the BBC Micro, Lucifer cipher, Grover’s algorithm, and OCCAM:

Oh, and here’s Tommy:

And Alan in his full “Professor” mode: