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> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and th

> in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing. Huh? I thought he was known as the father of computing because he literally defined the concept of a machine being Turing complete and what that meant you could and couldn’t do on a Turing-complete machine. That and the halting problem work (and to a lesser extent the Turing test), at least to me, are what make him the father of computing. The Enigma stuff is an impactful and vital short term impact he had while he was alive, but relatively fleeting and not very impactful on the broader field of cryptography. It’s the other contributions that are eternal and foundational to the field. This reads like someone who watched the movie about his life but didn’t actually understand the broader scope of what he did and why it was important.

Animats 1y ago
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley used to be considered the real fathers of computing. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was close to being a stored-program general purpose digital computer, and, eventually, when a memory unit was bolted on, became one. When the Moore School of Electrical Engineering wanted the patent rights to any new work Eckert and Mauchley did, they quit and formed a startup - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That became UNIVAC. The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche. UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines. (Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future. Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines. UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers. [1] https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history/comphistory/computerhistory-background-information/computer-history-remington-rand-punchcard-system/ https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history...
- vlovich123 1y ago
  Maybe practical real world computers but then I’d actually put Schokley and co as the true fathers having invented the transistor which is the only reason we have more than 6 computers - IBM otherwise would have been right because the energy and space requirements really would only have allowed for a small number of computers to have otherwise been built. But ENIAC wouldn’t have been possible without Turing’s foundational research on what it means to build a computation machine in the first place and ENIAC was even preceded by Z3 although it was the first electronic Turing complete machine (Z3 was electromechanical). They’re all important contributions but Turing literally defined the theoretical field. It’s like calling Townes, Schawlow, and Basov the fathers of the laser even though they just showed how to build the laser that Einstein predicted decades before. It’s important foundational work but most people know Einstein + laser whereas the names of the inventors of the first laser are less known. Einstein defined that it was even possible and how it would work. Others figured out how to achieve that through foundational science and engineering.
  - mcmoor 1y ago
    I thought ENIAC and Turing aren't really connected and independent to each other? And then again for development of physical computer, seems like Neumann have more claim to him because of his architecture.
    - vlovich123 1y ago
      Turing literally defined the mathematical underpinning of what it meant to build a computer in the first place and what operations it needed to support (the language and the computer instruction itself being indistinguishable at the time). Without this work we don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding of how to translate algorithms into something that can run on a machine. Neumann’s contributions were valuable and notable as they proposed to make machines more flexible than how the ENIAC worked, but these are largely just “applied engineering” improvements not foundational theoretical CS concepts; the Harvard architecture is equally valid and flexible as Neumann’s design, even preceding Neumann’s idea of not differentiating code and data. It just that the simplicity at the time of Neumann machines won out even though today we pay for their penalty in other ways. But without Neumann or Harvard architectures you still end up building machines and likely these ideas would eventually have been proposed and tried by others without any meaningful delay in development. Without Turing’s work it’s possible that computers would have been delayed by decades until someone else figured this stuff out. Without the transistor computers would just be an odd curio that’s in use in some places and basically the entire field wouldn’t exist (cryptography wouldn’t be a really thing, AI, databases, programming languages etc).
elzbardico 1y ago
I would say this makes him one of the fathers of computer science as an intellectual field, not the father of computing.
dboreham 1y ago
Not to diminish his work, but you can build a perfectly fine computer without the theoretical stuff. In fact Babbage and Lovelace kind of did. If we're making a list of people with large impact add George Boole.
jibal 1y ago
You're misreading ... that's the fictional story from the movies. Later in the article it says > ... Turing – did, in what is now one of the most famous academic papers ever written, On Computable Numbers. This is the actual reason Turing is “the father of computing”.
mkl 1y ago
The following two sentences: "It’s a great story. But, like a lot of great stories, it couldn’t be more wrong."

Animats 1y ago

J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley used to be considered the real fathers of computing. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was close to being a stored-program general purpose digital computer, and, eventually, when a memory unit was bolted on, became one. When the Moore School of Electrical Engineering wanted the patent rights to any new work Eckert and Mauchley did, they quit and formed a startup - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. That became UNIVAC. The big question at the time was whether the sheer complexity of something like a UNIVAC would be cost-effective. Watson of IBM opined that there might be a market for six computers. IBM was building a few computers for the Atomic Energy Commission and such, and they were seen as niche products. The Turing/Von Neumann line of development all fed into that defense niche. UNIVAC was bought by Remington Rand, which had a competing line of tabulating machines. (Entirely mechanical. Almost completely forgotten.[1]) Unlike IBM, Remington Rand saw electronic digital computers as the next step to the future. Remington Rand not only had the UNIVAC I, the Eckert-Mauchly machine, built. They built all the peripherals for data processing - the tape drive (the UNISERVO), the line printer, the typewriter-sized printer, the card to tape converter, the tape to card converter, and the keyboard to tape device (the UNITYPER) So, while it was expensive, the UNIVAC could do routine data processing, far faster than the tabulating machines. UNIVAC then sold the US Census Bureau two UNIVAC I computers. Census was, at the time, the largest tabulating machine customer of IBM, and rented several acres of tab machines. They were all on 30-day rental, that being what IBM insisted upon. Once the UNIVAC I machines were running, most of them became unnecessary, and the rental was cancelled. This was a huge shock to IBM as a corporation. (And the IBM salesman, paid on commission.) That's what kicked IBM into getting serious about computers. [1] https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history/comphistory/computerhistory-background-information/computer-history-remington-rand-punchcard-system/ https://www.museumwaalsdorp.nl/en/museum-waalsdorp-2/history...

vlovich123 1y ago
Maybe practical real world computers but then I’d actually put Schokley and co as the true fathers having invented the transistor which is the only reason we have more than 6 computers - IBM otherwise would have been right because the energy and space requirements really would only have allowed for a small number of computers to have otherwise been built. But ENIAC wouldn’t have been possible without Turing’s foundational research on what it means to build a computation machine in the first place and ENIAC was even preceded by Z3 although it was the first electronic Turing complete machine (Z3 was electromechanical). They’re all important contributions but Turing literally defined the theoretical field. It’s like calling Townes, Schawlow, and Basov the fathers of the laser even though they just showed how to build the laser that Einstein predicted decades before. It’s important foundational work but most people know Einstein + laser whereas the names of the inventors of the first laser are less known. Einstein defined that it was even possible and how it would work. Others figured out how to achieve that through foundational science and engineering.
- mcmoor 1y ago
  I thought ENIAC and Turing aren't really connected and independent to each other? And then again for development of physical computer, seems like Neumann have more claim to him because of his architecture.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    Turing literally defined the mathematical underpinning of what it meant to build a computer in the first place and what operations it needed to support (the language and the computer instruction itself being indistinguishable at the time). Without this work we don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding of how to translate algorithms into something that can run on a machine. Neumann’s contributions were valuable and notable as they proposed to make machines more flexible than how the ENIAC worked, but these are largely just “applied engineering” improvements not foundational theoretical CS concepts; the Harvard architecture is equally valid and flexible as Neumann’s design, even preceding Neumann’s idea of not differentiating code and data. It just that the simplicity at the time of Neumann machines won out even though today we pay for their penalty in other ways. But without Neumann or Harvard architectures you still end up building machines and likely these ideas would eventually have been proposed and tried by others without any meaningful delay in development. Without Turing’s work it’s possible that computers would have been delayed by decades until someone else figured this stuff out. Without the transistor computers would just be an odd curio that’s in use in some places and basically the entire field wouldn’t exist (cryptography wouldn’t be a really thing, AI, databases, programming languages etc).

elzbardico 1y ago

I would say this makes him one of the fathers of computer science as an intellectual field, not the father of computing.

dboreham 1y ago

Not to diminish his work, but you can build a perfectly fine computer without the theoretical stuff. In fact Babbage and Lovelace kind of did. If we're making a list of people with large impact add George Boole.

jibal 1y ago

You're misreading ... that's the fictional story from the movies. Later in the article it says > ... Turing – did, in what is now one of the most famous academic papers ever written, On Computable Numbers. This is the actual reason Turing is “the father of computing”.

mkl 1y ago

The following two sentences: "It’s a great story. But, like a lot of great stories, it couldn’t be more wrong."