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In 1936, the English mathematician
Alan Turing
(1912-1954)
designed at the age of 24, an
imaginery machine that could do any
calculations.
This machine, called the
Turing machine, was using
a set of instructions and works in some way like a modern computer. |
The first computers appeared in the
1930s with the
second world war: they
were quite primitive and used triode valves.
A code-breaking machine, named
"COLOSSUS", based on
Turin's ideas, was built in
1939
by the British. COLOSSUS was designed
to decode secret messages rather than do calculations.
After the war, Turing designed
the plans for a universal computer
that what was called the Automatic Computing Engine,
or ACE, which
was eventually built in the
National Physical Laboratory in England.
Because of his original ideas, Alan Turing
is considered as one of the
fathers of computer science.
