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\seventeenpointroman

Dear Jack,

What a great magazine you have. Not only is it useful, but it's
filled with great dirt. I actually read it cover to cover. Just
one small correction though --

The U.S. did not break the German ENIGMA code. Alan M. Turing
did, during WW2, in the British Secret Service. He did it using a
paper-tape calculator he designed and built called the Bombe. He
did a lot of very basic crypto work. He was a pioneer hacker; a
mathematician who taught himself electronics in order to build
the world's first all-electronic computers (predating American
computers by years.) He was the person who came up with an
obscure concept called 'stored program', whereby a machine can
modify its own instructions, while working on a seminal problem
in mathematics. His British Secret Service work was classified
until the 70's. He did other pioneering work in mathematics and
biology.

He was also gay, and quite 'out' in the British Secret Service,
in the 40's no less. I read about him first in A HISTORY OF
COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (1980, Academic Press). There's an
excellent, highly technical, biography of Turing called ALAN
TURING: THE ENIGMA by Andrew Hodges (1983, Simon \& Schuster). I
recommend both books to anyone interested in the history of what
we're collectively doing here.

Imagine where we would be if he had been censured because of his
sexuality. Simply put, we'd have no computers, but only overgrown
possibly-programmable calculators, which is where most of the
world was heading at that time\dots

(From another gay programmer), Tom Jennings / Fido Software /
World Power Systems, Box 77731, San Francisco CA 94107

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