As a young guy, one of the most fascinating aspects of World War II to me was the breaking of the Enigma Code.
Codebreaker Alan Turing created the machine at Bletchley Park in 1939 and it truly swung the tide, allowing an English military inferior in every way to best the Nazi war machine time and again. Recently, his papers, including his pioneering work on artificial intelligence and the foundations of the digital computer, were up for auction but failed to meet the minimum price at Christie's today - 300,000 British pounds.
That sounds like a lot, right? In recent years Turing became a 'hero for geeks' due to his work on artificial intelligence but also something of a martyr for gay men. Being a WW II hero only got you so far in post-war England and Turning was prosecuted for having sexual relations with a man. He quite literally committed suicide by biting into an apple which he had laced with cyanide.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently gave Turing a posthumous apology for his treatment then, though obviously it was a common occurrence in all countries of the period.
Controversy aside, Turing's electromechanical Bombe machine is regarded by many as the ancestor of the modern computer.
Bombe device developed by British cryptologists, initial design by Alan Turing.
