How timely! Just this morning I learnt a few anecdotal factoids about Turing's stay in Manchester, and his quarrels with the "old engineering guard" (Williams a

How timely! Just this morning I learnt a few anecdotal factoids about Turing's stay in Manchester, and his quarrels with the "old engineering guard" (Williams and Kilburn.) This comes from one of the professors who just retired from the University -- where Turing worked for a few year on the Manchester SSEM, also known as the Baby. It was the first stored program computer - effectively the first Von Neumann computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby http://www.computer50.org/ http://www.computer50.org/) The Baby was built by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn. They were both engineers who believed they were building a machine on which to do real science. At the time the only way to program the machine was by flipping switches and hacking away in binary machine code. Alan Turing was hired to come to Manchester and provide a sort of higher-level language so that scientists can use the machine, a sort of an assembler if you will. However, it turned out that Turing didn't mind all this bit twiddling at all! Instead of doing what the rest of the engineers were expecting, he ended up writing all sorts of AI and maths programs to work on problems he thought were interesting. Problems, which the "old guard" thought of as mere games. They were trying to do science, while this guy is just playing! Oh how the world changed... This lead to a great deal of friction between him and the engineers, the remains of which can still be seen today in Manchester. For example, none of the CS buildings were named after him -- the Alan Turing building was completed in 2007 and became the home of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, but not CS. Some have suggested that in addition to the above, his sexuality didn't practically help when dealing with the alpha-male 1950s engineering types he was dealing with, but let's not go that way...