Prefaced by "not me" obviously, I'm too young. But. Anyway: FWIW... I've never bought into the conspiracy theory. Homosexuality was illegal in and of itself, and if you were caught it was really hard to avoid court. No amount of connections were going to keep Turing out of the legal system. The 'medical cure' path was a well trodden (and obviously hugely wrong) path, which he acceded to, because if he didn't his security status would have been withdrawn (frankly, it was going anyway given how outside the mainstream he was) but the hormone therapy completely screwed him up mentally. It has a huge emotional burden. I'm told the physical symptoms, things like gynocomastia (man boobs) are pretty awful if you aren't primed for them. My dad knew him, they met at conferences. Sid died in the 1990s and my memory of talking to him about Turing is that he liked him and respected him, but was a bit distant. Sid was in the communist party so for obvious reasons, Turing and anyone else with a security clearance wasn't going to get very chummy. Sid certainly respected him, but he had a very old-school outlook on homosexuality and said "poor chap: he was mentally ill" and left it at that. My mum rolled her eyes. She'd been to art college, and had a more liberal view of things. Sids group at Imperial (ICCE, Tocher) had built a machine out of relays, cheap from the post office. I think we can probably guess why a large number of post office relays were available cheaply in the early 1950s. Turings group was further along the road and had more money, so the stuff at Manchester and the NPL was going on in parallel. A whole bunch of these early 1950s machines are written up in [1] including Sids stuff. Lots of the manchester staff are still around. Retired, but not gone. Tony Brooker for instance (I think he was subsequently at Essex) and Tommy Thomas (he went to CSIRO in Australia before he retired) I doubt they're on this list, but you never know. I don't think people from Bell who crossed over with Turing in his pre-computing era role are around, his post computing era role is somewhat complicated by a rather thick brick wall of not-invented-here between the US and the UK. A whole bunch of ideas about computing basically didn't pass across the Atlantic ocean in either direction, and each economies history of computing is very "one eyed" at times (thats my subjective opinion, but I'm biassed) I think most of the Bletchley cohort who were men of army recruitment age are gone now, The TRE engineers are mostly gone AFAIK, there are quite a few women (they tend to live longer) but given the sensibilities of the time, I would be surprised if they want to talk much: I knew an anglican priest who was heading to HK for the ministry before WWII who was moved sideways into Japanese and undoubtedly worked on the US/UK/AU shared decrypts from the Japanese crypto campaign, He simply refused to talk about it, at any level. Sid was a professor at Edinburgh, alongside Donald Michie who had worked with Turing. They (Sid and Donald) fought like cats and dogs over the AI story, there was no love lost there nor much mutual respect, so nothing came from that side, and Donald is dead too. I never really spoke to him about anything. By the time I had any sense of interesting questions to ask, It wasnt going to happen. Andrew Hodges did a tour when his biography of Turing first came out. I went to a series of seminars at Leeds Uni he gave which were fascinating. I don't want to over-state it, because it was back in 1983 or so, but I don't sense there is a hell of a lot of personal biographical detail beyond that which has come out. Again, I'm biassed, and probably wrong there. But it feels like a lot of not much. [1] B.V. Bowden ( ed.) Faster Than Thought ( A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines ) Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd. 1953 https://archive.org/details/FasterThanThought On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 12:34 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:

On 2018-06-06 10:59 PM, George Michaelson wrote: For more technical details on the surprisingly modern Manchester Atlas (and other machines), Per Brinch Hansen's "Classic Operating Systems" is a good anthology. ( https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=360596 ) --Toby