A Colossus Mark 2 Codebreaking Computer Operated by Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker, 1943
Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker at a Colossus Mark 2 in 1943 — the first programmable electronic digital computer, built to break German teleprinter ciphers. The photograph is held by The National Archives at Kew under FO 850/234. Machines like this were secret for thirty years, which shaped who was later credited with inventing computing.
Colossus was a state machine before it was anything else: designed for a government, operated by government staff, and classified so thoroughly that its existence was denied into the 1970s while the same country's civil computing industry was being outrun. That is the pattern the article traces into the later twentieth century — governments building automated systems, then discovering that the systems reorganise the authority of the people who commissioned them. The two operators here were among the thousands of women whose work at Bletchley Park went unnamed for decades. See computers, contested sovereignty and the birth of automated governance.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
