The Colossus Bet
“Should we modernize the legacy system or build a new one?” I’ve watched this question consume months of debate. The instinct is to pick one path, commit, and move. But eighty years ago, a wartime memo made the opposite call … and it changed the course of history. Both Options In 1944, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park faced a problem: they needed to crack the Lorenz cipher faster than existing methods allowed. A GCHQ retrospective describes how a memo proposed two competing approaches. One was incremental. The other, Colossus, was called a “much more ambitious scheme” … the first digital computer. The recommendation was to pursue both. ...