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by m0nty 2063 days ago
> even then they can't give credit where it's due

You might as well say not enough credit goes to Tommy Flowers, a man I have always admired for his ground-breaking work building Colossus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers

The popular imagination is not renowned for its grasp of detail, but the histories give due credit.

I would just say, antagonistic comments like "the Brits barely mention" and "they can't give credit where it's due" is nationalistic nonsense which has no place here.

3 comments

You might as well say not enough credit goes to Tommy Flowers, a man I have always admired for his ground-breaking work building Colossus.

Well that is the class system, Tommy was working-class whereas Alan Turing was a posh boy who went to boarding school and Cambridge. So of course he was airbrushed out.

There's also a certain prejudice against people who do practical things, which I have certainly been aware of while working in IT.
In the words of Verity Stob, in her takeoff of The Imitation Game, "What about the curious incident of Tommy's reputation in peace-time?" (https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/26/verity_stob_turing_mo...)
> I would just say, antagonistic comments like "the Brits barely mention" and "they can't give credit where it's due" is nationalistic nonsense which has no place here.

It is an empirical observation. So not sure is expressing "nationalistic nonsense".

There's nothing empirical about it, it's just that journalists are not bound to mention the Polish contribution when discussing Enigma, just as they don't mention many other nuances and wrinkles in the story. The histories (many written by British historians) most certainly do mention it, so your observation is more like "journalists paint with a broader brush than historians and miss out much of the detail." Well, who knew?