This is the blog bit. New posts tend to be announced on Twitter, @jonathan229 and Instagram, manturing, and the pictures are collecting in a puddle at Pinterest, but for image sources and copyright details where known there’s a list here.
An early memory of the first memory.
Local history for local people.
Tom Kilburn built the Manchester computer. Why didn’t Alan Turing get on with him?
Banana splits and pathetic fallacies
More perverse Manchester pleasures.
Abandoned trams and bitcoin railways.
On the men who started the witchhunt, and the homophobia still present in Cambridge.
A Bletchley Park secret: they wasted their women.
They might drop a suitcase on your head. If they’re J Robert Oppenheimer.
A mini-meditation on the attraction — and grotesquery — of Turing artefacts.
Bertha Swirles, Phyllis Lockett, Cicely Popplewell, Audrey Bates, and Mary Lee Woods. Did Manchester University computing did first create and then lose female expertise?
Paul Nash’s brand of southern English surrealism has had a resurgence in the last few years. But he was never neglected, and a 1948 Nash exhibition in Manchester was one of the visual highlights of the city, according to one of Turing’s closest friends.
There’s a thrill in first reading Patrick Blackett’s MI5 file, because it has big red ‘SECRET’ stamps on it. But it also tells the story of a colossal misjudgement.
- Turing
- Manchester
- Max Newman
- Tom Kilburn
- Cambridge
- Mark 1
- FC Williams
- Warren McCulloch
- Blackett
- Paul Nash
- Altrincham
- Audrey Bates
- Phyllis Lockett Nicolson
- King's
- JZ Young
- Buses
- Cicely Popplewell
- Geoffrey Jefferson
- Kathleen Lonsdale
- Festival of Britain
- James Yule Bogue
- Getty
- Oppenheimer
- Burgess
- Railways
- Phyllotaxis
- Bletchley
- Bertha Swirles
- JD Bernal
- Trams
- Joan Clarke
- Douglas Hartree
- Molly Harrower
- Lyn Lloyd Irvine
- Mary Lee Woods
- Michael Polanyi