Allen William Mark (Doc) Coombs (23 October 1911 – 30 January 1995) was a British electronics engineer at the

Post Office Research Station The Post Office Research Station was first established as a separate section of the General Post Office in 1909. In 1921, the Research Station moved to Dollis Hill, north west London, initially in ex-army huts. The main permanent buildings at ...

Dollis Hill Dollis Hill is an area in northwest London, which consists of the streets surrounding the 35 hectares (86 acres) Gladstone Park. It is served by a London Underground station, Dollis Hill, on the Jubilee line, providing good links to central Lo ...

. Coombs was one of the principal designers of the Mark II or production version of the

Colossus computer Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus ...

used at

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years followin ...

for codebreaking in World War II, and took over leadership of the project when

Tommy Flowers Thomas Harold Flowers MBE (22 December 1905 – 28 October 1998) was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help ...

moved on to other projects. Professor

Brian Randell Brian Randell (born 1936) is a British computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor at the School of Computing, Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He specialises in research into software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted aut ...

was researching the history of computer science in Britain for a conference on the history of computing held at the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

, New Mexico on 10-15 June 1976, and got permission to present a paper on wartime development of the COLOSSI at the

, Dollis Hill (in October 1975 the British Government released a series of captioned photographs from the Public Record Office). The interest in the “revelations” in his paper resulted in a special evening meeting when Randell and Cooombs answered further questions. Coombs later wrote that ''no member of our team could ever forget the fellowship, the sense of purpose and, above all, the breathless excitement of those days''. In 1977 Randell pubished an article ''The First Electronic Computer'' in several journals. COLOSSUS and the History of Computing: Dollis Hill’s Important Contribution'' by A.W.M. Coombs in The Post Office Electrical Engineers’ Journal (POEEJ; Volume70, 1977/78 part 2, July 1977, pages 108-110) Later at Dollis Hill Coombs worked on the

MOSAIC A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

machine. Coombs headed the scientific side of R14, the division working on

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...

for postal mechanisation, which moved to the new BT Research Centre at

Martlesham Martlesham is a village in Suffolk, England about two miles (3 km) South-West of Woodbridge and East of Ipswich. It is often referred to as "old Martlesham" by locals in order to distinguish this old village from the much more recent Martl ...

in Suffolk. His work on

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...

led to the development of an early postcode-reading machine. He frequently lectured on pattern recognition using the concept of multi-dimensional space, and the '

caltrop A caltrop (also known as caltrap, galtrop, cheval trap, galthrap, galtrap, calthrop, jackrock or crow's foot''Battle of Alesia'' (Caesar's conquest of Gaul in 52 BC), Battlefield Detectives program, (2006), rebroadcast: 2008-09-08 on History Cha ...

', and would demonstrate the presence of feature-detection in the human visual system by means of a flash gun, the persistence of vision in the audience leading them to observe disintegration of a character fragment by fragment. 'Doc' Coombs was notable for a facial 'tic', which gave him something of the appearance of the 'mad professor', and these days would probably be classed under

Tourette's syndrome Tourette syndrome or Tourette's syndrome (abbreviated as TS or Tourette's) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood or adolescence. It is characterized by multiple movement (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) ...

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* * 1911 births 1995 deaths Bletchley Park people British electronics engineers Civil servants in the General Post Office Computer hardware engineers History of computing in the United Kingdom 20th-century British engineers {{crypto-bio-stub

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Further reading and references

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