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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that in pop culture, Turing gets all the credit. Even the fairly recent movie doesn't do the justice.

Turing wasn't a publicly known figure for many years until a campaign to give him some prominence and highlight the injustices done to him started to get some ground. There was a strong gay rights thread to this, which obviously didn't apply to others.

While I agree others should no doubt get credit (Turing's coworkers also), the Computer History Museum and Bletchley Park do a good job (last time I visited) at describing everything relatively impartially. Media (screen and print) could often do a better job though.

I’m quite interested in the subject, but literally never heard of Rejewski until now and it feels pretty terrible. A lot gets said about other biases, but Poles seem to not get a lot of credit pretty consistently and often get appropriated by the host countries they had to work for. Hope that’s all in the past now…

Because cold war propaganda, and even some propaganda issues during the war.

Bad enough that despite half a million army on the western front, it was effectively banned to take part in London victory parade.

Have a read of the Charge at Krojanty for an example of Nazi propaganda. A myth that perpetuates till very recent.

The Imitation Game doesn't do justice to Turing himself, either. Pretty dreadful all around.

Pretty bold to write Turing as a socially inept autist loner with a temper problem when there’s zero historical evidence for any part of that characterization, only evidence suggesting the opposite.

And IIRC with a female romantic interest... that to me was the worst offense. It was an awful movie all around.

I suspect it was pretty good if you don't know or care about Turing. But yeah, it pissed me off pretty bad.

As I recall it was pretty clear what he was actually interested in, and it wasn't her, so it at least wasn't completely wrong on that particular point. I think it was explicitly sort of a show/cover relationship. But of course I saw it once a long time ago...

I've not seen the movie, but Turing was engaged briefly to Joan Clark, a fellow cryptanalyst, and they were close friends. She knew about his homosexuality though so it would have been literally a marriage of convenience, probably not uncommon at that time.

It is disgraceful that they used Turing's name in that film, was was almost completely fiction. Everyone involved in it should feel ashamed.

This movie was terrible and I thought hugely offensive to the memory of Turing and all involved. Awful awful awful.

Interested viewers may enjoy a somewhat more historical treatment in the BBC's "Breaking the Code", a 1996 made-for-TV movie starring Derek Jacobi.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udW0j96vAOk

Don't even bring that movie into this discussion, it's a historical atrocity.

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