Inside Turing: Computer boffinry to cuffing cups to radiators The National Museum of Computing celebrated the upcoming centenary of the birth of Alan Turing with a lecture at Bletchley Park on Thursday night. The event, Turing and his Times, is the second of three Turing-themed events linking three of the top computing museums in the world*. Turing and his Times featured a talk by …
If you claim to be "into IT" in any way, shape or form then you simply have to support Bletchley Park.
Spend the day, it is full of intrigue and wonder. Whilst I was there last I was awestruck with colussus. It could be argued (quite easily) that this place is the spiritual home of digital processing.
Why on earth would someone downvote this comment?
I attended a Turing celebration Cambridge 1997. Wonderful to meet Maurice Wilkes, Robin Milner and other men and women who had worked with Turing at Cambridge, Bletchley, NPL etc. People who witnessed the start of the computer revolution first hand. Sadly, most are no longer with us for the centenary but their legacy lives on at Bletchley Park.
Visitors to the UK - not to fat from Stratford: you can catch Shakespeare and Turing in one day!
When I did my maths degree at Oxford one of my third year lecturers was Professor Robin Gandy who'd worked with Turing during the war then, when he was able to go to University after the war had Turing as his PhD supervisor. He tauhgt a course on "Computational Complexity" which covered Turing machines and the theory around them and I remember that every so often during a lecture he'd mention some result and then add something along the lines of "I remember when we first worked this out and how Alan was very excited by what it showed us"!
That stuff about bicycle chains is surely an invention of Neal Stephenson's from his novel Cryptonomicon? You can read the relevant chapter at http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide18.html.
And yes, I know that HistoryArticles.Com supports this ridiculous notion (at http://www.historyarticles.com/enigma.htm), but I won't believe it until I see a pre-Cryptonomicon reference.
On May 15, 2011, we dedicated our site, ARG MetaPhoria, to Alan Turing, persecuted because of his sexual proclivities, the father of modern computing, and code cracker extraordinaire.
http://heddinout.com/?p=2910
I applied for that ridiculous UK Digital Director job, around this time last year . . . mostly as a joke, but as a continuing hack test.
You see, our site's code cannot be cracked by anyone in government . . . I contacted Cameron, Clegg, Pickles, MI6 (to include us in their weekly with Our Lady of Assumptions) . . . and many others. Yep, I contacted them all . . . and I'm still alive!
Just like George Orwell . . . Alan Turing's name and his contribution . . . have they both been diluted to merely an amusing annual event? Yep, we applied for the Orwell Prize for Blogging this year, but their heads are stuck so far up their asses . . . [we're too mainstream for you, Agent Weebley - maybe next year?]
Tomorrow, I will be sending an invitational email to Sir Alex Allan. Will he see that our ARG is one massive contradiction to government?
Either he's grateful for my email, or I'm dead.
Juicy Fruit, anyone?
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