1937 AD |
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| Many of the people who designed the early computers were both
geniuses and eccentrics of the first order, and the English mathematician Alan Turing was
first among equals. In 1937, while a graduate student, Turing wrote his ground-breaking paper "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." One of the premises of Turing's paper was that some classes of mathematical problems do not lend themselves to algorithmic representations and are not amenable to solution by automatic computers. |
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| Since Turing did not have access to a real computer (not unreasonably as they didn't exist at the time), he invented his own as an abstract "paper exercise." This theoretical model, which became known as a Turing Machine, was both simple and elegant, and subsequently inspired many "thought experiments." A few years later Turing was destined to be a key player in the design and creation of COLOSSUS, which was one of the world's earliest working programmable electronic digital computers. | ||
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| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
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