Jack Copeland

I have always had a fascination with the history of computers and this book chronicles in exciting and easy to read terms, the invention and early development of the first electronic digital computer as a universal machine, or Universal Turing Machine.

Born from necessity the development of Colossus is a story of secret wartime codes, national survival, piracy on the high seas, spies and espionage and the genius of the code breakers at Bletchley Park. It describes the roles of Alan Turing and a previously unsung GPO telephone engineer Tommy Flowers, whose proposal to build a computer using electronic valves in the face of almost universal criticism allowed the computing speed necessary to crack the Nazi Enigma and Tunny codes and shorten the Second World War by years, saving many, many millions of lives.

Post-war development of computers - as we know them today - into machines that can be programmed to carry out not just one function but any task from picture editing to playing music and movies to word processing is fascinating, and another of Alan Turing's greatest contributions.

And the list of contributions made by this unique and "shy genius" is long and significant, including theories of Artificial Intelligence, computer modelling of natural growth.

Alan Turing's final years do not make happy reading. I always believed he took his own life, but this account caused me to doubt this.

Jack Copeland's book appears to be very well researched and is peppered with citations from beginning to end. I have not checked the breadth of the sources quoted from however. Overall I would thoroughly recommend this book. It fills in the missing link between mechanical computers and their modern electronic descendants. I take my hat off to the author for his ability to describe, in simple enough terms for me to understand and be entertained by, some otherwise no doubt fiendishly complex mathematical concepts. This is a Stuart Taylor must read! :0)… (mere)

The message that I got from Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age is that he never got any of the credit that he rightfully deserved. The main reason for this is that a lot of the groundbreaking work that he did was at Bletchley Park and it had to be kept secret. Therefore, a vast majority of the credit for the development of the modern computer, stored programming, and artificial intelligence was given to others (both American and English). In fact, history books and textbooks on computer science up until fairly recently made no mention of the two men that were behind the development of modern computers: Alan Turing and Thomas Flowers. Turing was truly ahead of the times with his theories that computers could be 'taught' and that artificial intelligence was an inevitable part of our future (the fear is real within me, guys). Unfortunately, much of his findings on this went either unpublished or unseen and once again other scientists got the jump on him. (At this point, I have to say that this is just the opinion of one man but the overwhelming evidence backs him up.) I learned what the 'imitation game' is and also discovered I had read about it before in Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat. The author only briefly touched on the tragic end to Turing's life and suggested that the case may not have been a cut and dry suicide after all. You'll have to read the book to get the full details! ;-)… (mere)

See the article about this book at the Rutherford Journal online. Also see The Guardian (Jul 19, 2006). http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030109.html
Once one of the best-kept secrets in British history, Bletchley Park has achieved near-celebrity status over the past three decades. The wartime headquarters of the Government Code & Cipher School has starred in a novel, a feature film, at least one TV series and any number of non-fiction accounts. Most involve the word Enigma and include a starring role for the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing. And indeed the story of how Turing and his fellow codebreakers deciphered the Enigma Morse code traffic that signaled U-boat movements in the Atlantic is undoubtedly one of the most inspiring in the history of the second world war.… (mere)