this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Explanation: Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist whose revolutionary work during WW2 helped the British shorten the war considerably by breaking (and thus having access to) Nazi coded messages.
A little over half a decade after the war, a chance break-in at his house led to him accidentally incriminating himself - by admitting to the presence of his boyfriend. This being the 1950s UK, the courts gave him a choice for the horrific crime of homosexuality - chemical castration, or several months in prison. Turing considered that he would not last in prison, and opted for the chemical treatment. Some time later, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide and died, which many consider to be an act of suicide (though it is still disputed, some believe it was genuinely an accident).
Wait a second, Alan Turing was a queer icon? I had no idea.
I cannot fathom how anyone can allow people to be punished for loving who they love, in a consenting relationship between two adults. What a terrible and tragic story. Fuck anyone who wants to punish people for doing something that doesn't hurt anyone; for doing something that in fact is literally the direct opposite of hurting anyone. Like, fuck them to the core, and not in any nice way.
Yeah. He's a queer icon, and a god among humans to computer science fans.
It breaks my heart that he didn't get to see the current era of queer federated computing. If there's any kind of after-life, Alan has got to be rooting for the Fediverse.
I wouldn't say that he's a well-known queer icon, but well-known enough that there's been an enduring myth that the early Apple icon was a reference to him - the apple with a bite taken out of it and colored like a rainbow. However, the designers have said that they had no idea at the time and it was purely coincidence.
I'm not sure about that (the icon bit). I've gay friends who have been surprised that Turing was gay - personally I knew about it since I knew about Turing, but I was a nerd who was interested in the theory of computation. It's only relative recently (with the popularity of unbelievably lousy character-assassination like "the Imitation Game"*) that he's been more in the general public eye, I think.
Apple laced with cyanide is an accident ??
Damm what a wild times. I would though, with my quite non-normal, reasoning capabilities it would have been done intentionally to murder someone....
Poor storage of laboratory chemicals is the alternative explanation. While plausible, suicide seems more likely to my eyes.
The story is at least semi-plausible, but Turing also still had friends in the right places (not enough to dig him out of the hole he got himself into with the local plod*) and there was a strong social taboo around suicide.
(* At the time there was good reason to believe that the end of the outlawing of homosexuality was just around the corner, so offering a genuine explanation was not necessarily Turing acting as such a naif as is often portrayed.)
Since Snow White, we all know this wasn't an accident.
Some have speculated that it's the origin of the Apple logo but Jobs confirmed it wasn't.
"Almost singlehandedly" is way off the mark. Welchman, Tutte - the place was filled with eccentric geniuses; it was the success of management as much as the individual that Bletchley saw so much success.
("The story of Hut 6" is a good read on the subject. What comes across was that success was down to serendipity as well as hard work, and some remarkably enlightened leadership.)
It's worth mentioning that German cryptologists had some considerable success cracking British codes as well, notably including the cyphers the Admiralty used to communicate with merchant ships in convoys during the first half of the war. This was a major factor behind Britain nearly losing the Battle of the Atlantic before they even had a chance to participate in the re-invasion of continental Europe in 1944.