Tony Sale, Colossus computer conservationist, dies

[Peter Tomlinson]

End of June I had to be in Milton Keynes for a morning meeting, so 
decided to travel the previous day, go to Bletchley Park, then stay 
overnight. This was only my second visit, the first one (courtesy of 
Bristol BCS section, who had hried a coach and invited me to fill a 
spare seat) being only a short time after the museum got started.

Colossus should be running, I was told in reception, so I trekked up the 
hill. As I and a couple of other people were looking at the exhibits in 
the first room, an old man came walking quickly through. Only after he 
had passed did I realise that it was Tony, looking very much older than 
the pictures that I had seen.

Walking round to Colossus, which was indeed running, I got talking to 
one of the volunteer guides and an American who had worked in one of the 
wartime listening stations on the east coast of Scotland. Then Tony 
appeared from behind Colossus and a very brief exchange ensued before he 
disappeared again - I sensed that he was closing down.

Tony was but a boy when stored program computer architecture was first 
developed around the time that I was born. At the core of what we use 
now, the principles are still the same, albeit we have Von Neumann and 
Harvard architectures and RISC machines, and we simulate as we design 
(Charles Lindsey pioneered simulation in the latter half of the 1960s 
with the aid of a govt funded (ACTP) contract, and I wrote the first 
large scale gate-by-gate simulation model, which was a key stage in the 
development of the ICT/ICL 1904A/S/X range of mainframes).

RIP

Peter

On 30/08/2011 20:37, Marcus Williamson wrote:
> Tony Sale, Colossus computer conservationist, dies
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14720180
>
>
> .
>