In America and Israel the secret people often give the ideas to industry and therefore lots of products and ingenious firsts enable the Nation’s industry to utilise, grow and profit from the initial efforts of ingenious people, but this was/is sadly lacking in the UK.
With Alan Turing’s cracking of the German Enigma code it was Tommy Flowers that built a machine fast enough to be useful – providing rapid interpretation of the un-coded traffic and hence providing advanced warnings and thus time for counter – action. These efforts probably shortened the war by several years or may even have been responsible for winning it!
Why was it kept secret?: because after the war the myth that the code could not be broken was never repudiated and the British and Americans sold on captured Enigma machines to other nations; listening in. Even to allies! Nothing changes these days we have similar news like the NSA & GCHQ tapping the German president’s mobile phone (Snowden revelations).
The first ever digital computer was built in 1942 “Colosus” in England. In America they claimed they invented the first computer called ENIAC (1946) and this resulted eventually in the first American computers, with the efforts of Alan Turing at the burgeoning ICL labs in Manchester seriously underfunded. This is just one example. So the American (IBM) profited by controlling the computing market. A similar thing happened with Frank Whittle‘s Jet Engine!
Many authors quoting historical data and even full books about computing history right up to present time are ignorant about this history, many Americans just keep on stating that it was america that invented the computer, when in fact it goes even further back to another Englishmen Babbage.
Alan Turing is beginning to get the fame he deserves, films like The Imitation Game but nothing much is put out about Tommy Flowers.
The work of both these great men Tommy Flowers & Alan Turing is told with a reconstituted “Colossus” computer in operation at Bletchley Park. This is the real history of computing and code breaking and every school child in the UK should know it and visit.
