I took graph theory with a professor who talked about Bill Tutte a lot. A lot of theories were proved by him. You could see his name all over in the index of the back of our textbook. This professor always pointed out that Bill was a chemist too. This is a well known graph theorist who was in awe of him.

The U-Boot commanders all knew that the Enigma had been cracked, but Admiral Doenitz refused to believe it.

Rommel's Afrika Korps was also defeated by Enigma, because Rommel also refused to believe it was cracked. Enigma pointed out when and where Rommel's supply ships were.

No matter how secure your encryption method is, one should always assume it is cracked. Me, I would have backed it up with one-time pads.

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...

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”.

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

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.

I will agree that the first sentence is ill-considered (if nothing else it could've been broken up with one extra phrase), but it's really the worst offender. In my opinion the prose in rest of the article is perfectly reasonable. For anyone interested in the subject matter but discouraged by this awkward beginning, I would urge you to press on.

If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.

And the article hasn't yielded the style all the way to the end. It was not fun to read with English being my second language; but I think now that's expected of The Guardian - little information spread out extensively with flowery language.

I'd say it's more a failure of the educational system if 99% of people cannot interpret a sentence like that.

People who have visited Bletchley Park or are into early computing history know of Tommy Flowers. Few others do.

He should have been involved in 1950s computing. But he went back to the Post Office Research Station to work on phone switches again. He did good work on phone switches.[1] But vacuum tubes in phone switches were never a good idea, and the technology of phone switches was its own little world. Fully electronic phone switches were several decades away.

[1] https://www.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/emuseum/electronicsw...

I suppose knowing that they cracked Enigma (and what it is) there and knowing who Alan Turing is qualifies as less than a “tiny” amount because I had no idea who he is, and I would wager that’s more than a large majority of the public know.

He's certainly in the histories I've read, but I guess most people don't read those.

Also, his grandson often sits in front of my Mum and Dad at football matches! Although I only found that out a lot later.

I was under pretty much all the false impressions mentioned in the article, it was a nice introduction for me. The name comes up, but I never connected the dots.

Ran across the name, perhaps.

If you asked me for some names in early computing, I'd come up with Babbage, Ada, Turing, Zuse, Eckert and Mauchley, perhaps Atanasoff and Berry. I don't think I'd have come up with Flowers.

I'll do my best to right that wrong, but it really takes effort to rewrite history when something's declassified. In the same way that we all celebrated the SR-71 when in fact, the A-12 flew higher and faster, earlier, but it was classified, there's a mountain of material out there still claiming the SR-71 held all those firsts, when in fact not a single one of them was true.

Until Flowers' name rolls off the tongue as easily as Turing's, we have work to do.

Did you ever see them or a character in their role in a movie?

The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.