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The legacy of Alan Turing

worked at the Post Office's research centre at Dollis Hill, North London, and, taking Newman's blueprints, spent ten months putting Colossus together. It was delivered to Bletchley Park on 8th December 1943 and was an immediate success.

At the end of the war, the British government were anxious to keep the achievements of Bletchley Park secret for as long as possible (one of the reasons was that they captured hundreds of Enigma machines and wanted to sell them to other governments but they didn't want those governments to know that Enigma was decipherable). As a result, Colossus was dismantled and the plans destroyed (obediently, by Tommy Flowers). However, the fact Turing and others saw his ideas turned into reality enabled the computer to be fully realised in the decade that followed.

The existence and importance of Bletchley Park and the story of Colossus remained a secret until the publication, in 1974, of Captain F W Winterbotham's "The Ultra Secret". Alan Turing committed suicide on June, 1954 and so did not live to garner the appreciation his work so richly deserves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
[AH-WHOI] Andrew Hodges; Who Invented the Computer?; see: http://www.turing.org.uk/turin g/scrapbook/computer.html
[AH-A TB2] Andrew Hodges; Alan Turing: a short biography: Part 2 Matter and Spirit; see: http://www.turing.org.uk/bio/p art2.html
[DJ-23PR] David Joyce; Hilbert's Mathematical Problems; (1997); see: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoy ce/hilbert/toc.html
[PU-EMUS] Welcome to the ENIAC Museum Online; see: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~mus eum
[JO-AMTB] J J O'Connor and E F Robertson; Alan Mathison Turing; (2003); see: http://www-history.mcs.st-andr ews.ac.uk/Biographies/Turing.h tml
[SS-CODE] Simon Singh; The Code Book; (Fourth Estate, London, 1999);
[SU-HPRG] Hilbert's Programme; (2003); see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entr ies/hilbert-program
[WI-GINT] Gdel's incompleteness theorems; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G %C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t heorem
[WI-PMAT] Principia Mathematica; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P rincipia_Mathematica

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