Alan Turing's Manchester | Virtual Talk

Manchester is proud of Alan Turing but does it deserve to be? Jonathan Swinton's book Alan Turing’s Manchester book explores the complexity of the city Turing encountered in 1948.
His book is a richly illustrated account of the lives lived - and of one cut tragically short.
In this online talk for TNMOC, Jonathan will tour this smog-bound, bombed-out city that was busy creating one of the first computers.
Jonathan will look at how the tensions of class, gender, and sexuality converged at a time of great technical innovation and at the consequences this had for Alan Turing and the development of post-war British computing.
You can buy Jonathan's book at the TNMOC online shop:
www.tnmoc.org/tnmocshop/alan-...
Recorded 19/9/2023

[@tnmoc]

You can buy Jonathan's book at the TNMOC online shop: www.tnmoc.org/tnmocshop/alan-turings-manchester-by-jonathan-swinton

[@WilliamHarbert69]

Fascinating presentation. Thank you.

[@gustinian]

Extremely interesting talk, thank you. Our school had acquired an Elliot 803B from that era and few could fathom it sufficiently to program it via paper tape let alone its potential uses. As for attempting biological mathematics, Turing was freakishly gifted. That said, he clearly wasn't working in a vacuum.

[@FergalByrne]

Excellent talk thanks Jonathan! I can confirm the sad story of UK computing as I spent two student Summers (1991/2) at ICL in West Gorton, helping with mainframe chip design and then the giveaway mainframe database software you described. Things were getting grimmer by the week there and it wasn’t long before it was all over.