One man’s mission to uncover a WWII decryption machine

 “I find it quite amazing, the move from seeing a photograph of the Colossus in 1975 to standing in front of the Colossus in 2013,” he said. It started when Randell set upon writing a book in the 1970s, on the origins of digital computers. “I set myself as the scope from Charles Babbage in 1837 through to the earliest computers that we would recognise as digital computers, modern in every sense other than visual. In particular, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), which was built at Cambridge and is now being rebuilt at Cambridge and at the TNMOC,” he said.