Reports

Ros Downing ‘’Four inventors of computers and internet’’ 28th June 23

FOUR PEOPLE IMPORTANT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET-
ADA, TOMMY, GEOFFREY AND TIM
Ros Downing
Ros, who worked in the IT industry for many years, gave an extremely surprising and entertaining potted history of IT development since the nineteenth century. Ros began with a description of how Ada Lovelace, often called the world’s first Computer Programmer, developed algorithms and worked on developments of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
This was only the first of several initiatives pioneered by British scientists and mathematicians which went unrecognised by successive governments, allowing the US, Taiwan, and China to dominate the computing world in the 21st century.
Tommy Flowers developed the use of valves in computers at Bletchley park, but was bound by the Official Secrets Act to such an extent that his revolutionary work to improve the reliability of computers was ignored and his ‘Colossus’ computer – used at GCHQ throughout the Cold War – went unrecognised until comparatively recently.
Similarly, Geoffrey Dummer’s 1957 work on Solid State Transistors was not adopted until the 1970’s, by which time the US had established world dominance in this field.
It was only in the 1980’s and 1990’s that a British scientist became internationally known for his work; Tim Berners-Lee developed the HTML computer language which made the World-Wide-Web possible. At last, some recognition!