Re:Bidi Brackets for Dummies
by cryptonector on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @06:03PM
(#23922102)
Yes indeed, the Polish really helped a lot. But obviously they could not continue their efforts after Poland fell -- not in Poland anyways. And everything else you say is also true. The last thing you say is particularly insightful: that the U.S., by using commercial contractors, was essentially committing to letting them commercialize some of the technology, while the UK by not using commercial contractors, was not and then did not. It's especially sad that homophobia led to the early end of Turing's life -- imagine what he could have done had he lived longer!
It's useful to note here too that UK's work in WWII was started by desperate Polish need, and there is indication they got somewhat further ahead than people tend to credit them for. (It's interesting to wonder if Poland may have been ahead in computation if it wasn't, you know, invaded, and forced to kick the ball over to the UK.)
It's also worth noting the different approaches to "war time secrets" the US and the UK took. Where Alan Turing had a strong practical head start on computation in WWII, his work was locked under confidential and secret designations and he was not allowed to commercialize it after the war. Worse, he was almost entirely stopped from building practical machines, and it's a wonder he managed to contribute as much to computing theory as he did even with the restrictions he was under. (Also don't forget his own government lead him to an early suicide.)
The US in its contractor-based approach (including IBM's involvement) didn't hamstring commercial interests anywhere near as strongly (despite declassified hindsight now telling us they were straggling behind, comparatively, UK's efforts) so much after WWII by locking things into a "classified vault" and the US did not try stopping the people who had worked on computation from continuing to work on computation.