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 Professor Jack
Copeland,
University of Canterbury, New Zealand: Turing, Pioneer of the Information Age  At
the turn of the millennium Time magazine listed Alan
Turing among the twentieth century's 100 greatest minds,
alongside the Wright brothers, Albert Einstein, Crick and
Watson, and Alexander Fleming. Turing’s achievements
during his short life of 42 years were legion. Best known
as the genius who broke some of Germany's most secret
codes during the war of 1939–45, Turing was also the
father of the modern computer. Today, all who click or
touch to open are familiar with the impact of his ideas.
To Turing we owe the concept of storing applications, and
the other programs necessary for computers to do our
bidding, inside the computer's memory, ready to be opened
when we wish. We take for granted that we use the same
slab of hardware to shop, manage our finances, type our
memoirs, play our favourite music and videos, and send
instant messages across the street or around the world.
Like many great ideas this one now seems as obvious as the
cart and the arch, but with this single invention – the
stored-program universal computer – Turing changed the
world.Turing was a theoretician’s theoretician, yet he also had immensely practical interests. In 1945 he designed a large stored-program electronic computer called the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE. Turing's sophisticated ACE design achieved commercial success as the English Electric Company's DEUCE, one of the earliest electronic computers to go on the market. In those days – the first eye-blink of the Information Age – the new machines sold at a rate of no more than a dozen or so a year. But in less than four decades, Turing's ideas transported us from an era where ‘computer’ was the term for a human clerk who did the sums in the back office of an insurance company or science lab, into a world where many have never known life without the Internet. tirsdag
den 13. januar 2015, kl. 17
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