Update to
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 Alan Turing: the Enigma |
Page 277: There were actually ten Colossus machines. There is an on-line description of the machines and an account of the partial rebuilding of one by Tony Sale on his site.
Page 278: The day of the invasion of Normandy, 6 June 1944, was actually the date of AMT's progress report on the Delilah, released from secrecy in 2004. See the document on this Turing Sources page.Page 299: Thomas Goldstrasz and Henrik Pantle kindly brought to my attention the assertion in my original text that Zuse's calculators were used on the construction of V2 rockets. This was entirely incorrect. Zuse machines were in fact used on aircraft design, but the significant point is how little the German war effort harnessed his ideas. As far as I know this was the worst blunder in my book. It was corrected in the Walker Books 2000 edition.
Page 304 and note 5.26: Conventional history of the origin of the computer still emphasises a primary role for von Neumann. Yet in describing Turing's origination of the computer as something done with 'marked independence' of von Neumann, I may well have understated both Turing's originality and his actual influence. It can be argued that Von Neumann was greatly assisted by knowing Turing's formulation of computability. The logician Martin Davis's new book The Universal Computer, The Road from Leibniz to Turing (2000) makes this claim very clearly.
There is further material in the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook: Electronic war and Who invented the computer?
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