WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
BILL TUTTE
became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1958 and of the London Royal Society in 1987. He became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2001, and has a road named for him in Waterloo, Ontario. He died in 2002.
JOHN TILTMAN
was the first non-US citizen to be inducted into the NSA Hall of Fame. He was awarded the British honors OBE, CBE, and Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, as well as the Legion of Merit from the US Armed Forces. A consultant for the NSA until
1980, he died in
1982, in Hawaii.
C. E. WYNN-WILLIAMS
who had studied with Ernest Rutherford before his wartime work, returned to
Imperial College London, where he became Reader in Physics. In 1957, he received the Physical Society’s Duddell medal in recognition of his work on the counting device that would be used in Colossus. UK Government Scientific Intelligence advisor, Professor R. V. Jones, wrote in 1981: “The modern computer is only possible because of an invention made by a physicist, C. E. Wynn-Williams, which may prove to be one of the most influential of all inventions.” He died in 1979.
MAX NEWMAN
would go on to help produce the world’s first stored-program electronic computer in 1948 in the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of
Manchester. Known as the Manchester Baby, it was a direct ancestor of the Ferranti Mark 1, which in 1951 was the first commercially available generalpurpose computer. It was co-developed by Conway Berners-Lee, father of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Newman turned down an OBE in 1946, but was already a Fellow of the Royal Society before the war, and received its Sylvester Medal in 1958. He died in 1984.
ALAN TURING
was famously persecuted by the British government for his homosexuality, taking his own life as a result, and eventually being pardoned in 2013. After the war, he worked for the National Physical Laboratory, where he developed ACE, the
Automatic Computing Engine. Its 25 kilobytes of memory, accessed at a speed of 1MHz, was described as “very large indeed.” He moved to the University of Manchester to join Newman, where he consulted on the software for the Ferranti Mark 1, before becoming interested in mathematical biology and morphogenesis, the development of patterns and shapes in biological organisms, before the structure and role of DNA were known. He was made an OBE in 1946, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951. A road and bridge in Manchester are named for him, and there is a statue of him in the city, too. In 1999, Time magazine named Turing as one of the “100 Most
Important People of the Century.” He died in 1954.
GORDON WELCHMAN
moved to the United States in 1948, where he taught the first computer programming course at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Among his students was Frank Heart, who would go on to help design the first routing computer for the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. Welchman would work for Ferranti, and on secure communications systems for the US military at Mitre. He wrote a book about his wartime work in 1982, leading to him losing his security clearance and thus his position as a government consultant. He died in 1985.