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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did

I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."

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The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a lot of money due to owning the company. Being able to own something being built by a lot of people is how its possible.

>If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.

I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.

Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names.

The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone else had the idea of using thermionic valves to greatly increase the speed of the code breaking computer, so if Tommy Flowers didn't exist it probably wouldn't have been discovered until much later (i.e. too late to help the war effort). Of course CEO's such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have made important individual contributions to society, but they were not as pivotal as that of Tommy Flowers, and furthermore they have been rewarded in money (many would say too much), whereas Tommy Flowers has received very little reward or recognition for his achievement.

Do you also feel the same way about J. Paul Getty? Is he the "hero" of oil production, or, as many believe, a robber-baron who would stop at nothing to enrich himself?

I feel nothing about him since I don't know who he is. He died long before I was born.

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