If the allied success in beating Nazi Germany could be laid at the door of any one person, that person must be Alan Turing. To say that he was mostly responsible for saving the lives of many hundreds of thousands of merchant seamen, sailors and soldiers would be an understatement of epic proportions. After the war this giant among men was hounded by what should have been a grateful nation and government just for being a gay man. He was threatened with imprisonment. chemically castrated, hounded from his important work and shunned by the very establishment that he had without doubt saved. Alan Turing killed himself by taking cyanide in 1954 and has been largely ignored ever since.

Thankfully, today HM has exercised her royal perogative and granted a full pardon for Alan Turing... Perhaps now, a grateful people and government, will elevate this man to his rightful place in our history; up there with Newton, Babbage, Brunel, Churchill and the many others. If ever any single person deserved attention it is Alan Turing! RIP

Well said. Churchill himself stated that the work Alan Turing did at Bletchley on enigma shortened the war by a good two years. Perhaps now a posthumous knighthood would be in order. Had he not been gay he would have undoubtedly had one in the 50s.

It is one of my claims to fame that, back in the 60s, I was taught computing by the man who took over from Turing at the University of Manchester, a fact which has so far signally failed to impress anyone.

I think that's most impressive flopsy! He must have been an incredibly hard act to follow.

I'm impressed Flopsy

To be honest, I don't think that I was all that impressed at the time... it was only later, when I started to use computers for my job - and still later, for my livelihood - that I realised how important those guys had been. Not just the contributions made in the war by Turing, Flowers, et al, to decoding Enigma and Lorenz but afterwards, when they created an electronic world we now take for granted.