WWII

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: After the wartime emergency, Turing joined Britain’s National Physical Laboratory. There he helped finalize plans for an Automatic Computing Machine (ACE), which followed his 1937 theory advocating a device that could do many tasks depending on the information fed into it. Unfortunately, the National Lab was bogged down in bureaucratic inertia and, discouraged by the slow pace, Turing, in 1948, accepted a position at the University of Manchester.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: After study at King’s College, Cambridge and a Princeton Ph.D., Turning had laid the theoretical foundation for the modern programmable computer. In a dazzling insight, almost a casual aside, in a footnote, he described in theory that one might construct an automatic machine that given the correct input or instructions, could do just about anything requiring computation. The device, later dubbed the Turing Machine, would read a series of ones and zeroes recorded on tape. These numbers would tell the machine what to do to solve a problem or perform a task. In the rather rigid world of computer theory at the time this was revolutionary. Up to that point most computers were dedicated, they were designed for a particular, usually narrow purpose. Turing was suggesting another approach. Later his idea would come to fruit as engineers would create a universal piece of computer hardware that could be told to do many different tasks by its software.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Alan Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912. His father was a functionary of the British
Civil Service in India. Turing’s parents considered life on the sub-continent unsuitable for their boys and left their raising to the care of relatives in England. Eventually, Alan was sent to boarding school, Shelbourne in Dorset, where a speech impediment and lack of proper training in Latin grammar made him the target of much cruel humor by the other boys. He was a loner and at Shelbourne first came to recognize and accept his homosexuality. He also showed an extraordinary capacity for mathematical reasoning and, perhaps because of his long periods of loneliness, began a lifelong fascination with the human mind and with what he considered its limitless capacity to create imagination, wonder, and beauty in the middle of an emotionally barren landscape.