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ALAN TURING

Alan Turing was born in 1912 in London. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University. In 1937, he wrote a report which talked about a Turing Machine. This was a machine that could read programs and follow any number of instructions. It was only an idea, and he did not have plans to build the machine, but his 1937 report was very important in the history of computing.

In 1939, Turing began to work for the British Government. During the Second World War, the Germans often sent messages from one group of solders to another. These messages gave important information and instructions, so of course they were secret. Although the British cold get the messages, at first they could not understand them because they were written in a secret code.

Turing worked with other mathematicians at a secret place called Bletchley Park. They knew that the Germans were using machines called Enigma machines to send messaged in code. To read and understand these messages you had to have another Enigma machine – and, of course, only the Germans had these.

Turing and the other people at Bletchley built a machine called the Bombe. By 1942, the workers at Bletchley Park could read and understand all the German messages which used the Enigma code.

In 1943, the Germans started using a different code. The British called this code ‘Fish’. It was much more difficult to understand than the Enigma code. The Bombe machine could not break this code, so the workers at Bletchley needed a new computer. In one year, they built Colossus. This was one of the world’s first electronic computers which could read and understand programs.

Colossus got its name because of its size: it was as big as a room. It was able to understand difficult codes because it could do thousands of calculations every second. Without Colossus, it took three people six weeks to understand a message written in the ‘Fish’ code; using Colossus, the British needed only two hours to understand it. A modern PC do the work any faster.

(from Information Technology by Paul A.Davies, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles, Oxford University Press 2000)

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