At the turn of the millennium Time magazine listed Alan Turi ng among the twentieth century’\;s 100 greatest minds\, alongside the Wright brothers\, Albert Einstein\, DNA busters Crick and Watson\, and th e discoverer of penicillin\, Alexander Fleming. Turing’\;s achievemen ts during his short life of 42 years were legion. Best known as the genius who broke some of Germany’\;s most secret codes during the war of 19 39-45\, Turing was also the father of the modern computer. Today\, all who click or touch to open are familiar with the impact of his ideas. Turing was a theoretician’\;s theoretician\, yet like Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton before him he also had immensely practical interests. In 1945 he designed a vast stored-program electronic computer called the Automati c Computing Engine\, or ACE. Turing’\;s sophisticated ACE design achi eved commercial success as the English Electric Company’\;s DEUCE\, o ne of the earliest electronic computers to go on the market. In those days –\;the first eye-blink of the Information Age-the new machines sold a t a rate of no more than a dozen or so a year. But in less than four decad es\, Turing’\;s ideas transported us from an era where ‘\;comput er’\; was the term for a human clerk who did the sums in the back off ice of an insurance company or science lab\, into a world where many have never known life without the Internet. ‘\;Turing: Pioneer of the Info rmation Age’\; is an introduction to Turing and his ideas\, from the universal computing machine of 1936 through Bletchley Park and the ACE to his famous 1950 article ‘\;Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ \;. ht tp://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/120502.html.
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