Further to Bill Bryson......

Having finished The Road to Little Dribbling I have turned to another Christmas present, The secret life of Bletchley Park, Sinclair McKay.

So far absolutely fascinating and makes you in awe of the genius of those people.

Thought provoking, what would we be doing now if those codes had not be broken.

Bill D.

An absolute tragedy what the government did to Alan Turing after all that good work though. Unbelieveable today.

Edited By Hopper on 08/02/2016 08:28:41

He was of his time, and unfortunately, within enough of the public spectre for it to not go unnoticed by the law, he allegedly chose the hormone treatment because he privately thought it was a load of rubbish and wouldn't harm him anyway. That much i can believe but for no discretion to turn a blind eye to a single incident after all the work he did for them? that's cruel.

I have read the book and many others on the same subject. We all take computers for granted but without Turing and his work we might not have them. Binary numbers ? the guy was just awesome.

Yeah, very awesome. I believe that binary started off with the idea of "boolean logic" -so named after George Boole that stipulates that everything can be reduced to a simple "has" 1 or "has not" 0.

Spent a couple of days with one of Dads cousins in 1984 when I was visiting UK, he was one of the technicians at Bletchley Park, and I learned quite a bit about his time there.

Ian S C

And the 'work-horse', who translated 'genius' into reality, was Tommy Flowers, he gets my medal.

.

+1

And the 'work-horse', who translated 'genius' into reality, was Tommy Flowers, he gets my medal.

+2 and then went back to his old job at Dollis Hill.

I'm guessing the people who prosecuted him had no knowledge of Bletchley Park & those who knew weren't telling?

Tony

My wife's uncle Claud was at Bletchley as a radio operator. In part of his role he was assigned to various spies & was able to tell when one had been compromised by the change in style of morse code. The Germans would try to deceive us by carrying on the routine & giving false messages. We would realise & play the same game.

He was a radio ham & known all over the world. One small room of his house was dedicated to his home built gear. He loved doing morse ( the hobby was gradually dying as it gave over to speech) The speed at which he could send & receive morse had to be seen to be believed

Many years later he was reading about radio opps at Bletchley & read an article that 9 operators were so good that they could receive & decode 2 incoming morse signals at once ( The Nazis used to send morse over morse to confuse us). He announced that he was one of the nine & had no idea that only 9 could do it & although working there throughout the war he did not know any of them

He was a really lovely old man and when he would have been 100 ( died some years earlier) the whole family had a re union in his memory

His call sign was "George 2 Dog Peter Queen."

I have a yacht & the electric autopilot is nicknamed George. I have a second one which is an Aeries wind steering autopilot. I could not call it George 2 so it is nicknamed "Uncle Claud" ( from George 2 etc)

When the going gets rough & the electric autopilot gets overpowered "Uncle Claud" always gets me home

I believe Tommy Flowers gained a GCSE certificate in computing in his old age and that was the only computer work he did after the War.

Another +1.

JA

"I'm guessing the people who prosecuted him had no knowledge of Bletchley Park & those who knew weren't telling?

Tony"

That is a very good point, from a historical perspective, the work at bletchley wouldve been top secret and valuable knowledge to soviet spies. If he had a reputation for being a bit of an oddball anyway it would've neatly lined him up for a guilty verdict. A pretty torrid time for Alan Turing. He was very knowledgeable with the acids he was using for his electroplating experiments so i'm fairly sure he committed suicide in the end.