Flowers was one of the first people to push data around with tubes. There was also an IBM group working on that before WWII, and by 1943 they had the "Vacuum Tube Multiplier" working. That eventually became the IBM 603 in 1946.
I've seen one in an IBM historical display; it looks like a very large hard-sided suitcase made of perforated black metal. The 603 was a limited product built to answer the question of whether electronics could be deployed to field locations and serviced by IBM maintainers. Only 100 were built. They solved the problems of making tubes work in the field, so the IBM 604, the production version, was built in 1948. This was the beginning of IBM's line of cost-effective electronic business machines, ending with the IBM 650, which was a full scale computer affordable by businesses. Knuth learned to program on an IBM 650.
Much of early computing was about getting memory that worked, tubes that worked, capacitors that worked, connectors that worked, and making the things maintainable. All that didn't really come together until the IBM 1401, which was the first mass-produced computer that Just Worked.
It wasn't an architecture problem. The general ideas there had been worked out in the 1930s by Eckert at Columbia University, who came up with some insane mods to IBM tabulating machines to use them for scientific purposes.
This kludge, in 1934, was the first automatic number-crunching computing machine.[1] Eckert went on to become a founder of UNIVAC.
Understand, all this was being done in an era where a reliable AM radio was hard.
I learned about Turing at university in the 2000s, before his personal history became a vogue subject. Specifically, I learned about Turing machines and the halting problem, alongside Von Neumann machines and such.
It wasn't until later that I learned about Turing's suffering due to his sexuality.
so I am quite curious: why is Flowers underrated? What contributions did he make to his fields similar to Turing's?
Most of his important work has been done during the War and it was classified (being applied in electronic cryptographic machines), so he was not allowed to brag about it.
A realpolitik lesson for the scientists of the future: next time you have the power, hold it, don't squander it on politicians, begging for crumbs, grants and the decency of a private life. Oppenheimer should have continued his quote "now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" with "bow to me mortals, cause it is I that controls the machine" not "here you go Mr. Truman, go nuts with the bombs".
Also, Turing can never be overrated, beyond being the one who pulled us into a new metaphysics of computability (alongside Alonzo Church and others, sure), he will also be the one to bring the 22nd century into a new metaphysics of morphogenetic freedom [1] [2] [3]. Not sure about Flowers, but Turing knew there were realms of computationality way beyond their present tubes and levers.
The story of Turing is indeed particularly interesting for the chemical castration and run ins with law over the big government interference in his personal life. If we talk just about people who have achieved things in computing the list is huge but if we discuss people who gave sp much and had government then take so much it's a different list isn't it? But I don't see that as being a bad thing.
So yes Turing is a great representative of an aspect of history we should strive not to repeat. That's not a bad thing.
Yeah but the point is that it's ok that we consider Turing special from all the others who also contributed because the other circumstances make the whole story more interesting.
You changed the context pretty substantially by moving it to the end of the piece and putting it in scare quotes though. I also read it as intentionally pejorative. You might want to edit the post if that's not what you meant.
Turing had very important contributions to the design of several early computers, culminating in the Ferranti Mark 1, the first general-purpose electronic computer available commercially (in 1951, ahead of UNIVAC).
The most well-known contributions of Turing to the instruction set architecture of Ferranti Mark 1 were a pair of instructions that were added to other CPUs only many years later, i.e. the equivalent of POPCNT (added by Intel only in 2009, in Nehalem) and of RDRAND (added by Intel only in 2012, in Ivy Bridge).
No other reasons are necessary to recognize his great merits.
Turing’s work wasn’t fully understood or appreciated until the the 1980s specifically because many of the documents which revealed the extent of his contributions were classified by the UK government until then, and yes because of the social attitudes of the time, particularly regarding his sexuality. Without those two things he would have got far more credit than he actually did.
The declassification, and a thawing of social attitudes toward LGBT people enabled Turing to be recognized as the figure he is today. So yes, file it under equality, diversity and inclusion all you want.
> Until the 1980s or so, Turing wasn't known much outside mathematics, and was considered a minor figure in computing. Von Neumann was the big name in computer architecture, and Friedman was the big name in cryptanalysis.
Big part of that is because a lot of what he did was kept classified or not publicized too much by the British government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with his name.
Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure.
The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.
Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.
If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.
> Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him?
I also find this strange.
On the one hand I'm tempted to see this from a cynical lens of government propaganda ('we were always at war with Eastasia/Oceania').
On the other hand governments are somewhat the extension of the society they're in. The choices are to put [Turing of the £50 note](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2019/july/50-pound-bank...) or to not put any British gay people who were persecuted by the government (and most were historically) on the £50 note. Maybe we should be glad that governments are flexible and not limited to the history it inherited.
George Dyson has good evidence that von Neumann and the IAS team studied Turing's paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. You can find video of Dyson talking about this: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FibuHyIHnU&t=1131s>
Although I believe that Claude Shannon [1] was the father of computers and a much more important person than Alan Turing who probably had a more "controversial" personality and thus he became a "cinematic" figure.
Possibly - but this thread is about Turing, because of an article about Alan Turing, which was posted by the Alan Turing institute on the anniversary of the birthday of, you guessed it, Alan Turing.
Because Shannon's name has to be heard as well just for some people who admire Steve Jobs as the biggest IT Idol in the universe and have no idea who the hell is Dennis Ritchie. Just saying..
You claimed it was Turing's personality which made him a "cinematic figure". Now you are coming with irrelevant articles about how sexual orientation is linked to personal traits like openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. For your argument to follow, it should be that one of these made him a cinematic figure, huh?
A lot of what Turing did was kept classified or not publicized too much by the British government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with his name.
Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.
Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.
If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.
"The British Government" isn't some singular immortal person. I imagine the people in charge of naming this academic institute had nothing to do with his conviction or homosexuality laws in the 1950s, they most likely weren't even alive then.
In all seriousness, governments consist of the people of a given time, and as such, attitudes change. While an apologetic stance probably should be held, the people responsible for the shift in stance aren't likely to carry any of their predecessors' due guilt.
> Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.
Thats not exactly a fair representation of what happened. They kept everything about the cracking of the Enigma a secret because it was a huge shift in information warfare. Also, while Turing was a big part of it Bletchley Park had hundreds of staff, and all of them were equally impacted by post-ware secrecy provisions.
Implying that he, and he alone, was responsible for the cracking of the Enigma and that he alone was suppressed in history is a wild mischaracterisation of the realities of the time.
* necessary disclaimer: Turing was unquestionably a war hero and what happened to him post-WWI was barbaric and a dark mark on history.
He claims Turing's achievements are often oversold. Whether or not that is true, the historical connections to Turing's theoretical work are interesting.
Some of these comments are absolutely wild. It should go without saying that Alan Turing made an enormous impact on computing...but it looks like it needs to be said.
Nobody is trying to argue that Turing is the *only* important figure in computing. The fact that he is celebrated doesn't negate the impact of anybody else.
Edited to add: For anyone who's doubting Turing's impact on computing, or anyone who thinks that it's a modern phenomenon, Kleene's 1971 textbook [1] makes it pretty clear that he had an important impact.
Made even more bizarre for the fact that its on HN. This isn't some generic subreddit, presumably most people understand that a topic as vast as computer science couldn't possibly be attributed to one person, but that doesn't make the contributions of these early pioneers any less.
I really don't like the web page design - images that expressnothing, similarly flabby text.
My Dad actually met Turing, so i have always been excited (shake the hand that shook the hand) by him, and what he accomplished, but this page doesn't do anything for me, or i expect for anyone else.
To anyone who questions Turing singular contribution, not just to computer science, but to technological civilization in general I would point to one pithy fact: Alan Turing invented software. Computing machines existed before Turing, but they were all purpose-built for a single task. Turing was the first to describe a machine whose behavior could be changed to do anything you wished without modifying the hardware. The details of the architecture of the machines we use to perform computations today differ in detail from Turing's original design, but not in their essence, and not in their fundamental capabilities. The list of people who had as much practical positive impact on the world as Alan Turing can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The way he was treated by his country after all he achieved and the lives he saved is a great outrage and a tragedy, and I always wonder what else he may have contributed to the world had he lived longer.
47 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 43.3 ms ] threadI find it astounding that Flowers wasn't even fully compensated for the personal expense he took to buy the bits to make Colossus.
Bill Tutte also deserves a mention.
I've seen one in an IBM historical display; it looks like a very large hard-sided suitcase made of perforated black metal. The 603 was a limited product built to answer the question of whether electronics could be deployed to field locations and serviced by IBM maintainers. Only 100 were built. They solved the problems of making tubes work in the field, so the IBM 604, the production version, was built in 1948. This was the beginning of IBM's line of cost-effective electronic business machines, ending with the IBM 650, which was a full scale computer affordable by businesses. Knuth learned to program on an IBM 650.
Much of early computing was about getting memory that worked, tubes that worked, capacitors that worked, connectors that worked, and making the things maintainable. All that didn't really come together until the IBM 1401, which was the first mass-produced computer that Just Worked.
It wasn't an architecture problem. The general ideas there had been worked out in the 1930s by Eckert at Columbia University, who came up with some insane mods to IBM tabulating machines to use them for scientific purposes. This kludge, in 1934, was the first automatic number-crunching computing machine.[1] Eckert went on to become a founder of UNIVAC.
Understand, all this was being done in an era where a reliable AM radio was hard.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/switch.html
It wasn't until later that I learned about Turing's suffering due to his sexuality.
so I am quite curious: why is Flowers underrated? What contributions did he make to his fields similar to Turing's?
Also, Turing can never be overrated, beyond being the one who pulled us into a new metaphysics of computability (alongside Alonzo Church and others, sure), he will also be the one to bring the 22nd century into a new metaphysics of morphogenetic freedom [1] [2] [3]. Not sure about Flowers, but Turing knew there were realms of computationality way beyond their present tubes and levers.
[1] 1952, Alan M. Turing, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing...
[2] "The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis with Dr. Michael Levin", https://youtu.be/p4Fm7jLNrpg?t=125
[3] "Morphogenesis: Geometry, Physics, and Biology with Dr. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan", https://youtu.be/b1-sEhB5h8Y?t=85
The story of Turing is indeed particularly interesting for the chemical castration and run ins with law over the big government interference in his personal life. If we talk just about people who have achieved things in computing the list is huge but if we discuss people who gave sp much and had government then take so much it's a different list isn't it? But I don't see that as being a bad thing.
So yes Turing is a great representative of an aspect of history we should strive not to repeat. That's not a bad thing.
That was from the original web page.
The most well-known contributions of Turing to the instruction set architecture of Ferranti Mark 1 were a pair of instructions that were added to other CPUs only many years later, i.e. the equivalent of POPCNT (added by Intel only in 2009, in Nehalem) and of RDRAND (added by Intel only in 2012, in Ivy Bridge).
No other reasons are necessary to recognize his great merits.
The declassification, and a thawing of social attitudes toward LGBT people enabled Turing to be recognized as the figure he is today. So yes, file it under equality, diversity and inclusion all you want.
Big part of that is because a lot of what he did was kept classified or not publicized too much by the British government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with his name.
Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.
Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.
If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.
I also find this strange.
On the one hand I'm tempted to see this from a cynical lens of government propaganda ('we were always at war with Eastasia/Oceania').
On the other hand governments are somewhat the extension of the society they're in. The choices are to put [Turing of the £50 note](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2019/july/50-pound-bank...) or to not put any British gay people who were persecuted by the government (and most were historically) on the £50 note. Maybe we should be glad that governments are flexible and not limited to the history it inherited.
19 is not pre-pubescent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
Why the need to play one up?
Are you sure?
Science is about growing the frontier of knowledge, akin to making a cake larger, not dividing up a cake.
Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.
Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.
If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.
In all seriousness, governments consist of the people of a given time, and as such, attitudes change. While an apologetic stance probably should be held, the people responsible for the shift in stance aren't likely to carry any of their predecessors' due guilt.
Thats not exactly a fair representation of what happened. They kept everything about the cracking of the Enigma a secret because it was a huge shift in information warfare. Also, while Turing was a big part of it Bletchley Park had hundreds of staff, and all of them were equally impacted by post-ware secrecy provisions.
Implying that he, and he alone, was responsible for the cracking of the Enigma and that he alone was suppressed in history is a wild mischaracterisation of the realities of the time.
* necessary disclaimer: Turing was unquestionably a war hero and what happened to him post-WWI was barbaric and a dark mark on history.
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html
He claims Turing's achievements are often oversold. Whether or not that is true, the historical connections to Turing's theoretical work are interesting.
Nobody is trying to argue that Turing is the *only* important figure in computing. The fact that he is celebrated doesn't negate the impact of anybody else.
Edited to add: For anyone who's doubting Turing's impact on computing, or anyone who thinks that it's a modern phenomenon, Kleene's 1971 textbook [1] makes it pretty clear that he had an important impact.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/BubliothecaMathematicaStephenCol...
My Dad actually met Turing, so i have always been excited (shake the hand that shook the hand) by him, and what he accomplished, but this page doesn't do anything for me, or i expect for anyone else.
The way he was treated by his country after all he achieved and the lives he saved is a great outrage and a tragedy, and I always wonder what else he may have contributed to the world had he lived longer.