Contested Histories: De-mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 60

In the middle of April 1936, Turing presented Newman with a draft of his breath-
takingly original answer to the Entscheidungsproblem [4]. At the heart of Turing's
paper was an idealised description of a person carrying out numerical computation
which, following Church, we have come to call a “Turing machine”. All modern
computers are instantiations of Turing machines in consequence of which Turing's
paper is often claimed to be the single most important in the history of computing.
From the moment Newman saw Turing's solution he took him under his wing.
Newman canvassed successfully for “On Computable Numbers” to be published by
the London Mathematical Society and, simultaneously, enlisting Alonzo Church's
assistance in arranging for Turing to spend some time studying in Princeton.
Cambridge in the late thirties and early forties seems to have provided particularly
fertile soil for computing pioneers and Newman played a part in the education of most
of them. In addition to Alan Turing and his exact contemporary Maurice Wilkes,
other students of Newman's included Tom Kilburn, Geoff Tootill and David Rees.
5 Bletchley Park
On the 16 th March 1939, as war was breaking out across Europe, Newman was
awarded a fellowship of the Royal Society. However, there was little opportunity to
use this as a springboard for further work in mathematics. The outbreak of hostilities
took one colleague after another out of academic life into war work. Newman grew
increasingly disillusioned with life at Cambridge and at the suggestion of Blackett, he
accepted a post at Bletchley Park. Neither of them could have had the least inkling
that Newman had embarked on a course which was to completely alter the future
direction of his career. Max was initially appointed as a cryptanalyst as part of John
Tiltman's group. The type of transmission which attracted the greatest interest was
known as 'Tunny' and carried messages between the very highest ranks of the Ger-
man command. Manual methods utilising statistical techniques had been devised for
breaking into the code but the sheer volume of traffic being intercepted was beginning
to overwhelm the human resources available.
Newman believed it was possible, in principle, to mechanise the attack on Tunny
and successfully lobbied to test his conviction by developing an electro-mechanical
code-breaking machine which came to be known as the “Heath Robinson”.
The Heath Robinson proved fairly unreliable but the results it achieved were
sufficiently impressive for approval to be given to develop a more sophisticated ma-
chine - the Colossus. A great deal has been written about this apparatus now widely
recognised as the world's first digital electronic computing machine. In the current
context, it should be sufficient to note that had Newman done nothing else in his ca-
reer he would have been assured of a place among the most important figures in early
British computing simply by virtue of having led the development of this machine.
6 Manchester and the Birth of Modern Computing
The Colossus was to have a profound effect on Newman's future career. He saw at
once, as few others did, the impact that computing would come to have on mathematics