[TUHS] In Memorium: Alan Turing

[George Michaelson]

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didn't his security status would have been withdrawn (frankly, it was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 at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> If there are people here who knew him I'd love to learn more.
>
> On Thu, Jun 07, 2018 at 11:32:24AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> We lost the Father of Computing, Alan Turing, on this day when he suicided
>> in 1954 (long story).  Just imagine where computing would've been now...
>>
>> Yes, there are various theories surrounding his death, such as a jealous
>> lover, the FBI knowing that he knew about Verona and could be compromised as
>> a result of his sexuality, etc.  Unless they speak up (and they ain't), we
>> will never know.
>>
>> Unix reference?  Oh, that...  No computable devices (read his paper), no
>> computers...  And after dealing with a shitload of OSs in my career, I
>> daresay that there is no more computable OS than Unix.  Sorry, penguins, but
>> you seem to require a fancy graphical interface these days, just like
>> Windoze.
>>
>> --
>> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm