Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, has an incredibly depressing ending.
Chemically castrated due to being an illegal homosexual, he died in dishonor over bullshit homophobia and new drugs that the 1950s possessed.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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And it wasn't until late 2013 that he was pardoned for the crime of "being gay", and ironically TERF island has only gotten worse since then.
i find it hard to say terf island has gotten worse since the 1950s.
i find it hard to say terf island has gotten worse since the 1950s.
I meant since 2013, because yeah, it did get better for a little while. And now they're policing the bathrooms.
ah! got it
I sometimes still wonder why it got worse after. I think it's got to do with Putin invading Ukraine's Crimea and concurrently, spreading disinformation in the UK and US, causing Trump to win, and Trump in turn spreading even more hatred...
But that they could win was also reinforced by long standing social issues; the lack of proper and affordable housing, free healthcare, (and later, enormous inflation) for one!
In times like these, oligarchs try their hardest to indoctrinate the populace that playing out against each other is preferable as otherwise, groups they dislike get rights.
When these marginalised groups don't get into the news much nor that negatively (but do get support from politicians), and the socioeconomic circumstances are good for the bourgeoise (and the proletariat too), I think it would be much better.
i would not be surprised if some decades from now it's common knowledge that russia is responsible for a very large part of the shit we're going through currently, basically all the far right parties seem to have kremlin hands shoved so far up their asses it's a wonder we don't see fingers when they yawn
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but we avenged him by turning computers gay
Every UNIX socks post is in memory of Turing. If you don’t agree you’re gay. And if you do agree you’re gay too. Computers are gay and by using one, you’re gay. Jokes on you, by reading this, you’re using a computer. You’re gay. That’s the actual Turing test
turing completemess refers to the idea that any computational system capable of universal data manipulation is completely gay
"For Turing," Aragorn uttered, a cock in each fist.
Alan Turing was the father of computer science, but didn't invent the first computer. Arguably the first computer was called the Manchester Baby and was created by folks at the University of Manchester.
Alan Turing was an absolute boss, though. Huge respect.
The first (turing complete) computer actually build was the Z3.
Not many people know about it, because central Berlin in 1943 was not a healthy place for a computer.
Yeah, the Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer. As others have noticed, you can go down the rabbit hole a long way, depending on what you define as a computer. Fascinating stuff.
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It was 1941, and not seen as valuable by the Germans.
The British built Collosus in 1943 and used it for code breaking.
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The ENIAC was before that and Charles Babbage's difference engine was before the ENIAC, though I don't think he actually got it out of design
Also before the ENIAC was the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
Yeah, there were plenty of precursors (hence the MB was arguably the first). But the Manchester Baby was the first stored-program general purpose computer. Gotta pick a point somewhere.
I think it's a fun debate between all of them. It doesn't really matter, but I enjoy reading the reasoning behind each argument.
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Depends entirely on the definition of computer.
There are so many "inventors of the first computers" it is ridiculous. Almost like creating a complex machine like a computer takes a whole many inventions and people who worked on it over a time span of multiple generations.
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Alan Turing, the inventor of the first computer*, was castrated by the British Government for being gay.
FTFY
*Not exactly, but not to diminish his immense contributions to computer science
Thank you. That part got my pedantic ass in a tizzy. Glad someone else mentioned it.
I don't think he's necessarily the inventor of the computer. There are a few possible candidates, including Ada Lovelace or Charles Babbage, who were earlier.
He’s the one who properly started computer theory, I suppose
Babbage invented the computer, Ada invented the programming language that would be used to program it. She even wrote the first ever bug in it.
https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html
"In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. This may well have been a typesetting error and not an error in the program that Lovelace devised. All the same, this must be the oldest bug in computing. I marveled that, for ten minutes or so, unknowingly, I had wrestled with this first ever bug."
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While Ada Lovelace did not actually help inventing the Analytical Engine, she was arguably a greater visionary than Charles Babbage, who, as I understand it, mostly thought of it in terms of calculations.
This is what she wrote in 1842, one hundred years before the first general purpose computer was actually built (Babbage's Analytical Engine was never built):
[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
babbage: the calculator lovelace: the programming language turing: the computer science
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Computing: invented by an incredible clever gay guy to fight nazis.
Honour his legacy.
A German guy called Konrad Zuse also invented computers around the same time. I honestly never wondered about his relation to the Nazis. I've just looked it up and he never was a party member, yet he worked for the military. Yikes.
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Konrad Zuse invented the first proper computer.
Alan Turing later invented computing.
This distinction is why computer science exists.
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I named* my first self-built computer after him! Does this make that machine gay? They put chemicals in the bytes that turn the friggin' hardware gay!
*call me a weirdo but I do often name stuff like household appliances and my trees.
Can I see your homebrew computer? I am working on 6502 rn and this sounds interesting
Turing is gone for years; got replaced with Midgard and then Tiberis, the current machine. Here's Tiberis:
inb4 my desk is a mess and to be replaced, and I need to clean Tiberis' guts. The pics highlight how dirty it is.
specs
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Oh sorry I thought it was homebrew as in built from logic gates. Cool machine anyways
Fair - what I said was kind of ambiguous. But yeah, "self-built" as "I bought a computer-of-Theseus 20y ago, and as I've bought new parts nothing of the original remains, so it's a new computer."
ironically they also put chemicals in alan that were supposed to turn him not gay
The only one who can decide your computer is gay is the computer itself.
Technically true, but as an admin with root priviledges, I can access system private keys and directly manage it's identity, such that it's choice is usually what I told it to want.
Tangent, boy I cannot wait for neurolink to let Grok in my brain. I'm sure it will lead to lots of new ways of thinking for me. 🙃😶😶🙄
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Being gay didn't contribute to his death. How the state treated him when they found out did. Anytime his name comes up I think about how many horrible people there are in the world who just can't let others be what they are . Fanatics are somewhat evil by nature.
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A language isn't Turing complete if it isn't gay
this is not actually correct, he didn't invent the computer, he invented the turings machine
I also looked this up and many sources are giving credit to a guy named Charles Babbage. But perhaps this meme creator is defining computer differently.
Babbage is the creator of the first mechanical Computer (his Difference Engine).
Turing is the father of Computer Science, in that he created a mathematical model for computation (Turing Machines).
even then the degree to which charles babbage was responsible for his machines is somewhat contested.
even then charles babbage was inventing in an environment that was already highly geared to explore logic as a discipline with many people actively pursuing the same or similar objects of fascination. there are experiments in computation and entire computers far preceding babbage, going so far back as the earliest annals of recorded history.
a lot of people also don’t understand that babbage’s initial inventions weren’t even autonomous or mechanical/electrical. they weren’t computers in the colloquial, modern sense. at first they were basically just arrays of literal physical drawers, that the user had to physically move objects between, that could represent something akin to modern memory. this was rudimentary even at the time - the classical greeks famously were astute mechanist and the best of the wondermakers could make much more than just cranes: think autonomous robots, analog computational orreries, literal fucking lasers powered by the sun. by babbage’s time europeans were intimately familiar with engineering and computational principles far beyond what the average contemporary person realizes. the actual innovation is the conceptual handling of it. without that, babbage just made a fancy shelf.
either way babbage isn’t even remembered very fondly by the field. lovelace was far more influential and had far more intuition and genius to her work.
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He ended WW2 at least half a year earlier than it would have.
He saved hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions.
Then he returned home to England as a war hero, but was instead exiled and chemically castrated for being a homosexual.
Not much later he committed suicide.
It was Alan that first opened my eyes as a child to the senseless violence committed against LGBTQIA+
Every June 23rd I make sure to remember him and all he has done for humanity.
Rip Alan Turing, the father of computer science, i love you.
The movie was excellent
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