

Ask HN: If Alan Turing never died, could Britian have been Silicon Valley? - diminium

It was Turning's birthday a while back.<p>It's pretty obvious what caused Alan Turning's death but I have this weird feeling that Alan Turning wasn't the only one affected by this.  When you look at it, Alan Turning's death coincides with Silicon Valley's founding.<p>It almost looks like if the British never killed their own golden goose and set a precedence to all those involved in the industry about their worth to the nation, they too could have had their own technological revolution.
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michaelpinto
To rephrase your question: Was Alan Turing going to start a company that would
have rivaled HP or Intel? I think the answer to that is no. Would Turing have
put an unknown school like Stanford on to the map? Again the answer is no.

There have been some amazing technology entrepreneurs in England like Sir
Clive Sinclair who were just as good as their counterparts cross the ocean.
The thing is that there was no ecosystem to really support folks like this.
Although to be fair in America there were some amazing companies outside of
Silicon Valley that never grew an ecosystem that became larger (a good example
might be IBM).

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rst
Turing was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn't a businessman or a
charismatic leader. He did have a go at leading a computer development project
(the ACE project) at a government lab, but got frustrated enough with the
project and his role that he wound up decamping to what we'd now call a
systems programming job for the machine being built at Manchester. And even
his fellow academics regarded him as a bit of an odd duck, not always easy to
get along with or even to understand. (Maurice Wilkes's memoir has some
relevant anecdotes, including a conference talk in which Turing did blackboard
arithmetic in the least-significant-digit-first notation that he'd adopted for
the Manchester Mark I, to the general bafflement of the audience.)

There's a larger question, though, of whether something _else_ could have made
Britain a success in the computer industry. Especially since they briefly
started to do that. It's not just that the British were hugely innovative (the
group Turing joined at Manchester developed, among other things, the first
index register, very early HLLs, and ultimately virtual memory). More
importantly, they were also the first to deploy computers in industrial use.
Ferranti's commercial version of the Manchester Mark I is arguably the first
commercial machine to be delivered to a customer, and the LEO (a machine based
on Cambridge University's EDSAC) was running logistics for a chain of tea
shops in 1951.

So, why didn't these take off? A couple of possible reasons: First, building
computers at the time was a very capital-intensive business, and there wasn't
a whole lot of money for speculative ventures at the time --- both because
"Venture Capital" in the way we're used to didn't really exist yet anywhere,
and because postwar Britain was in pretty bad shape generally. Second, rather
than try to create conditions that would encourage researchers to branch out
to industry, the government had an explicit policy of trying to license
British-developed technologies to all comers, notably including American
companies like IBM. There's an MIT Press book on how this worked out; it's a
dry read, but the title tells the tale: "Innovating for Failure."

(By the way, similar things happened in other fields: The Brits developed the
world's first jet airliner, and wound up basically ceding the market to
Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed.)

