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Conclusion
How much credit should Turing get? It’s clear that he was the first to work seriously on a
general-purpose computer design in the UK, in late 1945, and that he showed remarkable fore-
sight and inventiveness. Soaking up ideas from many sources, and contributing many of his
own, he proceeded to write them all down clearly and coherently in a few pages. The commu-
nity of pioneers in the UK and the United States was relatively small until well after 1954, when
Turing died, and we can assume that word of mouth had a significant effect—and also that ideas
were not always properly credited.
In the end, though, it is now impossible to say to what extent Turing’s amazing and wide-
ranging foresights were passed on directly or indirectly to other pioneers, and to what extent
they were simply rediscovered as their time came. Regardless of that, Turing’s ideas indeed
formed part of the computing Zeitgeist for many years to come.^17