Displaying items by tag: Alan Turning

The oldest active digital computer in the world, the British WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell), after 39 years idle, has been put into operation once more at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. For those who do not know, Bletchley Park was home to Britain's top math and computer brains during the Second World War, including Alan Turing, and a place where the code for the German Enigma was broken. It is also where the first use electromechanical computers happened. Bletchley Park has been converted into a national museum of computing and the latest exhibit is the oldest digital computer ever to function.

If you own a computer, smartphone, watch, oven, microwave, well really almost any modern electronic device you have a host of pioneers that you should be thanking, but one of them Alan Turing should probably be at the top of the list. Turing was a mathematical genius who pioneered what would later become computer logic. Today (June 23) would have been his 100^th birthday if he were still alive.