THOSE who believe that technology might have advanced in the last 60 years will be greatly relieved to discover that a PC could have beaten the World War II code-cracking computer Colossus.

Britain's National Museum of Computing organised a contest between a rebuilt Colossus machine, which was developed to crack Nazi enigma messages, and anyone with a PC who would like to try their hand at beating it.

Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill would be a bit miffed to discover that not only could the Colossus be beaten by a home PC, but it was owned by a German.

Bonn-based software engineer Joachim Schueth deciphered the message, which was encrypted by a Nazi-era Lorenz cipher machine and transmitted by radio from Paderborn, Germany.

According to AP, it took Schueth two hours to decrypt the message which was an hour and 35 minutes faster than Colossus.

Schueth said that Colossus "helped to shorten the lifetime of the Nazi dictatorship" but was no match for its electronic descendants.

In fact he felt that putting Colossus in a competition with modern computers may be a bit unfair.