Campaign to save collection of rare Alan Turing papers ends in success

thinq.co.uk

50 points·ghalfacree··5 comments

Did anyone else notice how Google is referred to as "advertising giant Google", not "search engine Google" ? An accurate, but unconventional, portrayal.

What I'm wondering is who is attempting to sell the papers?

From the article:

The collection, now officially named the Turing-Maxwell Collaboration Collection, comprises the largest known collection of Turing's offprints in the world - given by Turing to his close friend and colleague Professor Maxwell Newman.

Wikipedia says that Newman passed away in 1984: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Newman

Is the current owner one of his heirs or some other party?

These are off-prints of published papers, not his original notes - so why don't I just go top the library stacks and photocopy the original journal ?

"The papers are thought to be of particular historical value as much of Turing's war-time work was destroyed under the Official Secrets Act and the man himself kept few personal possessions."

Yes - thats the point, all the interesting stuff - the notes on enigma and the invention of the computer are gone. All we have are a bunch of preprints from the 30s - but these are preprints of journals that do exist

(note to those under 50 : upto to the 1980s journals would send you a few dozen unbound copies of your paper for you to distribute - before photocopiers were common)

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