195 minutes in 1944, 46 seconds in 2007.

The winner of a contest to break a new message in a German cipher from World War II used a laptop PC and special software to compete with a reconstructed WW II Colossus electronic computer.

Colossus, the size of a bus and widely recognised as being one of the first recognisably modern computers, took three hours and fifteen minutes to unravel the code.

Mr Schueth and his machine took just 46 seconds.

"My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second - 240 times faster than Colossus," he said. "If you scale the CPU frequency by that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944.

"Even 40 years later many computers did not reach that speed."