Alan Turing was born in 1912 in London. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University . In 1937, he wrote a report which talked about a Turing Machine. This was a machine that could read programs and follow any number of instructions. It was only an idea, and he did not have plans to build the machine, but his 1937 report was very important in the history of computing.
In 1939, Turing began to work for the British Government. During the Second World War (1939-1945), the Germans often sent messenges gave important information and instruction, so of course they were secret. Although the British could get the messeges, at first they could not understand them because they were written in a secret code.
Turing worked with other mathimaticians at a secret place called Bletchley Park. They knew that the Germans were using machines called Enigma machines to send messages in code. To read and understand these messages you had to have another Enigma machine — and, of course, only the Germans had these.
Turing and the other people at Bletchley built a machine called the Bombe. (Some Polish mathematicians had already built a machine called Bomba to try to break the Enigma code. They worked with the British to build a new and better machine.) By 1942, the workers at Bletchley Park could read and understand all the German messages which used the Enigma code. The film Enigma, made in 2001, is about this time at Bletchley Park, and the race to diccover the code.
In 1943, the Germans started using a different code. The British called this code Fish. It was much more difficukt to understand than the Enigma code. The Bombe machine could not break this code, so the workers at Bletchley Park needed a new computer. In one year, they built Colossus. This was one of the world’s first electronic computers which could read and understand programs.
Colossus got its name because of its size: it was a s big as a room. It was able to understand difficult codes because it could do thousands of calculations every second. Without Colossus, it took three people six weeks to understand a message written in the Fish code; using Colossus, the British needed only two hours to understand it. A modern PC cannot do the same work any faster.
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