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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

What reward then for Bill Tutte who actually cold cracked a harder cipher than the one Turing supposedly cracked (He built upon earlier work by the Polish group who also made the first Bombes).

What reward for Tommy Flowers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers

I like Turing, I like his work, but he was by no means the only genius at Bletchley.

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Celebrating the less well known code breakers, an incomplete list includes

Arne Beurling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Beurling, a Swede who cracked the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_and_Halske_T52

Hugh Foss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Foss who first cracked the early commercial variants of Enigma back in 1927

Gordon Welchman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman ... argh where to start? :D

Not as widely remembered, but it sounds like those two did a bit better than Turing. They both died of old age after successful careers in their respective fields.

That makes it sound like a game. I don't think they would have viewed it that way?

I think you and the person I was replying to missed the second part of the other comment, which I believe to be the main point: "But none of that could have meaured up against just leaving the poor guy alone to pursue his own thoughts and loves. And who knows what gifts to the whole world he could have returned from that."

The reward they received is to live long lives without criminal prosecution and barbaric treatment at the hands of the law, I suppose. They also lived long enough to have their wartime work declassified and publicly recognized, which Turing never did.

Tommy Flowers was very badly treated: he was forced to destroy his work while others built on it.

If you want to activate even more dormant neurons: what about Konrad Zuse? Every CS course's history segment mentions Turing and (sometimes) Church while this man's only crime is having been on the wrong side of history and his reward being relegated to the margins of said history.

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