Like the early hackers, he made things. In Flower's case, he made things than enabled hackers (eventually). While theory is important and interesting, actually making sh*t that works moves things forward.
Yeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.
The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.
Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.
No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
Bill Tutte founded the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization in 1962 at the University of Waterloo (the year I was born!). No one knew about his Bletchley Park work until 1985; later in 2001 he was awarded the Order of Canada (he passed away the following year aged 84). I was amongst the usual group of often confused undergraduates in his C&O classes ... his mind just
operated on a level that few of us mere mortals could ever understand!
>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did
I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
Do you also feel the same way about J. Paul Getty? Is he the "hero" of oil production, or, as many believe, a robber-baron who would stop at nothing to enrich himself?
> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing.
Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing.
The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field.
This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.
My grandfather worked with Flowers at the Post Office. They worked on many aspects of digital telecoms for the decades after the war, leading to the world's first digital PCM telephone exchange 'Empress' in London around 1968, and System X nationally in 1980.
Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent.
I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
I have to say, the structure of that article is a perfect example of elitist exclusionary literature. Hang on: the introduction is wonderful, accessible language that most people can read. Then, the very first sentence of the actual meat of the article:
"On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich."
That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.)
What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF
For different reasons I agree the article is trash. There is far too much about Turing and Enigma, perhaps because they are better known, but Enigma is to Colossus as the first airplanes were to orbital rockets, but just years apart, not decades, and without thousands learning from each other.
I know, it's not a great analogy, but what the Tunny team did was so far beyond the Enigma team in terms of a) no prior knowledge of the actual system, b) the development of new cryptanalytic techniques, c) the educated guesses as to how the OKW system probably worked, and d) the sheer brilliance and vision of building a bleeding edge electronic system to do the heavy lifting, that its story, and Flowers', do deserve to be better known.
LLMs are great at stripping propaganda out of articles like this.
Tommy Flowers created Colossus. Alan Turing created Bombe.
Colossus was classified for a long time. Bombe was not. Turing ends up being well known, Flowers not.
Both men were humble and didn't make a big deal out their work.
To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention.
Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised.
After reading this post, I fear that LLMs and their ilk will make humans terrible at reading and comprehension, and impair their ability to think, much as how the advent of a car-first society resulted in many humans following a sedentary lifestyle to the detriment of their health.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] threadYeah, he also helped shorten the war which saved a whole lot of lives.
Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.
No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.
I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."
That's said, I wonder how many more forgotten working class heroes we have that powers that be decided to bury.
Well done for Guardian writing about this.
Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing.
The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field.
This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.
What about the Atanasoff-Berry-Computer from the US or the Zuse Z3 from Germany?
Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent.
I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
"On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich."
That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.)
What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF
I know, it's not a great analogy, but what the Tunny team did was so far beyond the Enigma team in terms of a) no prior knowledge of the actual system, b) the development of new cryptanalytic techniques, c) the educated guesses as to how the OKW system probably worked, and d) the sheer brilliance and vision of building a bleeding edge electronic system to do the heavy lifting, that its story, and Flowers', do deserve to be better known.
To twist that into a story of working class victim hood requires an unfortunate amount of intention. Sad how far the Guardian has fallen. Even writing about the history of computing needs to be politicised.
Edited: Bombe not Enigma.