Turing centenary

The Alan Turing Year was celebrated worldwide in 2012. Multiple Turing events were held in several cities. I attended quite a few of those events myself and audio recorded the speeches. My objective here is to compare and contrast claims that computer professionals, historians, and others have made about Turing and our field.

Lecture 3: "Turing's 1948 Bridge: from Logical to Practical Machinery"

Submitted by egdaylight on

Dated: 

28 January 2021

Many Turing scholars share a dualistic outlook on science and technology, distinguishing between non-causal (abstract) objects and causal objects. This outlook stands in stark contrast with Turing's monistic thinking and his answer to what a Turing machine meant to him in 1948. ......

... forthcoming ... in 2022 ...

[Last update: 22 November 2021]

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Vindicating Turing and von Neumann?

Submitted by egdaylight on

Dated: 

17 January 2020

Thomas Haigh & Mark Priestley have written a `historical reflections' column entitled “Von Neumann Thought Turing's Universal Machine was 'Simple and Neat.' But That Didn't Tell Him How to Design a Computer” (CACM, January 2020). The negation of the previous sentence is clearly false: That Did Tell Him How to Design a Computer.

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Chapter 1 of Turing Tales

Submitted by egdaylight on

The first chapter of my 2016 book Turing Tales is made available here. I explain my methodological stance on the history of computer science, and introduce the topic of "conflations," which I believe is key to understanding the history of science and technology.

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