Turing's work was almost always purely theoretical and his genius very much lied in his ability to think at a level of abstraction way higher then most of us can handle; the idea that he might have jump-started a new industrial revolution only seems to indicate that whoever came up with it had no understanding whatsoever of what Turing did besides hearing that Turing was "the father of the computer". This is so wrong I am surprised somebody went as far as to write an article about this, someone should just tell the Sunday Times guy to maybe do his homework next time he utters some sentences to thousands of people. Turing had more in common with Newton or Einstein (I think the mental leaps he did for example in his work on the Entscheidungs problem are almost of this order, even though again the abstract nature of his work make its applications and implications narrower and harder to see), then with Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.
Absolutely. What the newspaper piece seems to ignore is there's no reason to suppose that if Turing had lived longer he would have become the British Bill Gates rather than, say, enjoyed life as an academic computer scientist or mathematician?
> Turing's work was almost always purely theoretical [...]
Turing also got his hands dirty, and actually build some computers. So I'd put him closer to Feynman, who also did more applied work, than the theorist Einstein.
