From the Beeb site on 15th .
Seems hard to believe, but so does the £millions needed to preserve them.
"A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does," he said.
It was so fast, he said, because it was a single purpose processor rather than one put to many general purposes like modern desktop computers.
Re-building the pioneering machine took so long because all 10 Colossus machines were broken up after the war in a bid to keep their workings secret. When he started the re-build all Mr Sale had to work with was a few photographs of the machine.