Tony Sale–Thank You-RIP

It was my birthday on Saturday and in true geek style I decided the perfect way to spend my day would be to pay a visit to Bletchley Park.

This blog post was intended to be all about my visit but unfortunately I heard some bad news this morning so that’s on hold.

Tony Sale passed away on 30th August 2011 at 80 years of age.

He was the responsible for the rebuild of Colossus, the first modern computer and if it had not been for his efforts details of Colossus would have been long forgotten as it disappeared after the second world war. The rebuild project was a huge accomplishment and is even more impressive when you consider how little documentation was left behind. He was also a major driving force behind the work in getting Bletchley Park to where it is today and held roles such as Secretary of the Bletchley Park Trust and Museums Director.

I was fortunate enough to meet Tony on my first visit to Bletchley Park and he was a perfect gentlemen and happy to spend time chatting about Colossus and Bletchley Park.

Tony had his own website www.codesandciphers.org.uk which is a mine of information about everything Tony was involved in and it’s worth taking the time to have a look as it covers a variety of topics including details of how Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher, the Colossus rebuild and videos of some the talks Tony gave at the National Museum of Computing.

Details of Tony’s life are well documented elsewhere on the Internet so I’ll just finish by saying

Thank you Tony.

Every visit I make to Bletchley Park is better than the last and I’m grateful of the contribution you’ve made to the history of computing in this country.