He was educated at Dulwich College in south London, During his adolescence he built George the robot out of Meccano, and continued working on it until it reached a fourth version in 1949, when it was given much media coverage. Sale joined the Royal Air Force in 1949, serving until 1952. During his three years in the RAF, Sale gained a commission and reached the rank of Flying Officer. He was an instructor at RAF Officers Radar School at RAF Debden. Sale worked as an engineer for MI5 under Peter Wright in the 1950s. Between 1992 and 2007, Sale and volunteers rebuilt a functioning model of the Colossus Mark II which is on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Sale was survived by his wife, Margaret, three children and seven grandchildren.
Work
Sale worked with Marconi Research Laboratories, was Technical Director of the British Computer Society and managed the Computer Restoration Project at the Science Museum. After becoming interested in computers, he joined the British Computer Society in 1965 as Associate Member, being elected to Member in 1967, Fellow in 1988 and Honorary Fellow in 1996. He was elected to the Council of the BCS for the period 1967–70. In 1965, was a founder member of the Bedfordshire branch of the BCS and was named Chairman in 1979. In 1989, Sale was appointed a senior curator at the Science Museum in London and worked with Doron Swade to restore some of the museum's computer holdings. He was part of the group that started the Computer Conservation Society in 1989 and was associated with the Bletchley Park Trust from 1992 onwards. In 1991, he joined the campaign to save Bletchley Park from housing development. In 1992, he was Secretary to the newly formed Bletchley Park Trust, later unpaid Museums Director in 1994. In 1993 he started the Colossus Rebuild Project, inaugurated in 1994, to rebuild the Colossus computer developed and built by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in 1943. Sale lectured on wartime code breaking in the UK, Europe and the US. He was technical adviser for the 2001 film Enigma. Sale's web site, is a source of information on aspects of World War II code breaking. His booklet Colossus 1943–1996 outlines the breaking of the German Lorenz cipher and his remarkable rebuilding of the Colossus computer.
