Unless you are a Computer Science academic, you may not know something that was once a national secret of the highest classification … that it was Alan Turing, along with colleagues, who invented the first computer.
This was the work, carried out in secret in the 1940s from which all PCs, laptops and smart phones that we use today owe their inheritance.
His work during the Second World War at Bletchley Park, which culminated in the building of the code-breaking computer Colossus and breaking of the enemy ciphers, including “Ultra” and “Shark”, shortened the war by approximately two years and saved hundreds of thousands of military and civilian lives, both British and German.
It was only in the latter part of the 20th Century were the contributions of the codebreakers recognised, because of course, it was their duty to keep Mum.
And they all did.
Sixty years on from the early Fifties, it is almost impossible to imagine what our society was like, that it then persecuted such a national hero for who he was. That the police and the Courts used the law to administer dangerous drugs in attempt to change his behaviour.
If one thought about this, one might well conclude that “chemical castration” in order to attempt to change a person’s orientation is the State acting in a way that differs in degree but not in kind from some of the things the Second World War was fought to end.
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