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The declassification, and a thawing of social attitudes toward LGBT people enabled Turing to be recognized as the figure he is today. So yes, file it under equality, diversity and inclusion all you want.
The story of Turing is indeed particularly interesting for the chemical castration and run ins with law over the big government interference in his personal life. If we talk just about people who have achieved things in computing the list is huge but if we discuss people who gave sp much and had government then take so much it's a different list isn't it? But I don't see that as being a bad thing.
So yes Turing is a great representative of an aspect of history we should strive not to repeat. That's not a bad thing.
That was from the original web page.
The most well-known contributions of Turing to the instruction set architecture of Ferranti Mark 1 were a pair of instructions that were added to other CPUs only many years later, i.e. the equivalent of POPCNT (added by Intel only in 2009, in Nehalem) and of RDRAND (added by Intel only in 2012, in Ivy Bridge).
No other reasons are necessary to recognize his great merits.
I find it astounding that Flowers wasn't even fully compensated for the personal expense he took to buy the bits to make Colossus.
Bill Tutte also deserves a mention.
I've seen one in an IBM historical display; it looks like a very large hard-sided suitcase made of perforated black metal. The 603 was a limited product built to answer the question of whether electronics could be deployed to field locations and serviced by IBM maintainers. Only 100 were built. They solved the problems of making tubes work in the field, so the IBM 604, the production version, was built in 1948. This was the beginning of IBM's line of cost-effective electronic business machines, ending with the IBM 650, which was a full scale computer affordable by businesses. Knuth learned to program on an IBM 650.
Much of early computing was about getting memory that worked, tubes that worked, capacitors that worked, connectors that worked, and making the things maintainable. All that didn't really come together until the IBM 1401, which was the first mass-produced computer that Just Worked.
It wasn't an architecture problem. The general ideas there had been worked out in the 1930s by Eckert at Columbia University, who came up with some insane mods to IBM tabulating machines to use them for scientific purposes. This kludge, in 1934, was the first automatic number-crunching computing machine.[1] Eckert went on to become a founder of UNIVAC.
Understand, all this was being done in an era where a reliable AM radio was hard.
It wasn't until later that I learned about Turing's suffering due to his sexuality.
so I am quite curious: why is Flowers underrated? What contributions did he make to his fields similar to Turing's?
Also, Turing can never be overrated, beyond being the one who pulled us into a new metaphysics of computability (alongside Alonzo Church and others, sure), he will also be the one to bring the 22nd century into a new metaphysics of morphogenetic freedom [1] [2] [3]. Not sure about Flowers, but Turing knew there were realms of computationality way beyond their present tubes and levers.
[1] 1952, Alan M. Turing, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing...
[2] "The Collective Intelligence of Cells During Morphogenesis with Dr. Michael Levin", https://youtu.be/p4Fm7jLNrpg?t=125
[3] "Morphogenesis: Geometry, Physics, and Biology with Dr. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan", https://youtu.be/b1-sEhB5h8Y?t=85
Big part of that is because a lot of what he did was kept classified or not publicized too much by the British government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with his name.
Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a government research center named after him seems particularly strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war hero without the public knowing about it.
Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of the British government. She could have simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.
If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.
I also find this strange.
On the one hand I'm tempted to see this from a cynical lens of government propaganda ('we were always at war with Eastasia/Oceania').
On the other hand governments are somewhat the extension of the society they're in. The choices are to put [Turing of the £50 note](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2019/july/50-pound-bank...) or to not put any British gay people who were persecuted by the government (and most were historically) on the £50 note. Maybe we should be glad that governments are flexible and not limited to the history it inherited.