Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
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Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#2> Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#3> Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
aka historical revisionism
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#4At least the current political situation allows for embellishments. Last article I read attributed the invention of computers to Alan Turing.
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#5> Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
aka historical revisionism
Which is something we ought to do - i.e change our understanding of history - in light of new evidence and evolving moral sentiment, no? I don't see anything wrong about this.
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#6I really enjoy the “Overlooked” series of obits [0]. It’s interesting for some of them to go back and see who the NYT printed obits for on the day/week of the death. It’s not as if the sections are full of even more famous (if not accomplished) persons — on an average day, it seems that there were plenty of obits for people who were just relatively well-known in high society. Such that if the NYT had a better focus on science back then, a few of the overlooked women would have gotten at least a brief (though not the many who were overlooked or ignored by their own field at the time.)
I think Turing is probably the most famous in his own time to have been in “Overlooked”. Charlotte Bronte also has been featured but she died in the 19th century.
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#7Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. The top cryptographer of WWII was William Friedman, who turned cryptanalysis from guessing to machine-powered statistical crunching. The first programmable computer was built by Konrad Zuse.
Few people know any of those names today. Zuse should be remembered more. He had the right idea, and built a working machine, but it was destroyed by bombs during WWII.
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#8Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. Th…
Are there any good books about Zuse? He's mentioned in passing in almost every computer history book, like the "The Dream Machine".
Mostly they just say that his work was destroyed, and not much more, which is a shame! And then they devote hundreds of pages to his contemporaries.
I searched Amazon and apparently has an autobiography, which doesn't appear to be widely read:
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-My-Life-Konrad-Zuse/dp/35405...
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#9Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. Th…
Your history is inconsistent. Turing's homosexuality became public knowledge shortly before his death, which was also before anyone started writing the history of computing.
I don't think he's primarily remembered for his work on cryptanalysis. I think he's primarily remembered for the Turing test, followed by the Turing machine model, followed by his work on morphogenesis. That's just my opinion as a working mathematician.
Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary
#10Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. Th…
Turing machines and Turing incompleteness are utterly fundamental to computer science theory. He is rightly up there with Church and Godel for kicking off a proper analysis of what computers can and cannot do. (And then of course the Turing test was kind of a second version of that from the AI perspective.)
There are other plenty of people overlooked for WWII contributions due to secrecy, and I was disappointed by how much the NYTimes article focused specifically on that aspect of Turing's work and deemphasized the rest, but it's just flat out false that Turing would be a minor figure in computing history if not for his sexual orientation.