Alan Turing

Alan Turing is the man who came up with the idea of the "Turing Machine" which is the basis for the modern day computer. This machine had limitless memory and a scanner that could go through all the memory, reading what it went through and then come up with new information based off of that. It could decipher code and write its own program, which was the first time that it had been mentioned that machines could have some sort of intelligence. During WWII, Turing was part of the team that made "Colossus"which was a machine that was built to crack the Germans radio communications without them knowing that the code had been cracked. This was a very basic computer that had 1600 vacuum tubes, no internally stored programs, and was not a general purpose machine. Every time the machine was used for a new task, the wiring had to be switched out by hand. From there, many people started using programs from Turing to make there own computers. Turing's next accomplishment though was making high speed memory for computers. All of this work by Alan Turing led to what we now have in the modern day computer. Without him, we would not have computers as we know them today or we would not have the advanced computers that we have.