[Animats]

Turing has definitely increased in visibility over the last few decades. Von Neumann was considered the "father of digital computing", because he set down in detail how a general purpose stored-program digital computer ought to work. One was built, and it worked. A few billion Von Neumann architecture machines later...

Turing's automata theory work was obscure and not very usable. Turing's code breaking work was very specialized. The real theoretician of cryptanalysis was Friedman, who gave the field a theoretical basis, along with breaking the Japanese Purple cypher and founding the National Security Agency.

"Colossus", the electronic codebreaking machine at Bletchley, was not a general purpose computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner. Its predecessors, the electromechanical "bombes", were also key-testers.

Almost forgotten today are Eckert and Mauchly. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was a semi general purpose computer programmed with plugboards and knobs. This was a rush job during WWII, when naval gunnery and navigation tables were needed in a hurry. It did the job it was supposed to do. After the war, they formed Eckert-Mauchley Computer Corporation, and produced the BINAC.[1] This was the minimum viable product for a commercial electronic digital computer. All the essential subsystems were there - CPU, memory, magnetic tape drive, printer. Everything was duplicated for checking purposes. That got them acquired by Remington Rand, and their next machine was the famous UNIVAC I, with more memory, better tape drives, a full set of peripherals, and profitable sales. Eckert had a long career with Remington Rand/UNIVAC/Unisys. Mauchley stayed for a few years and then did another startup. More like a good Silicon Valley career.

[1] http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Eckert_Mau...

[youngtaff]

Doesn't Tommy Flowers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers) Colossus predate ENIAC?

Flowers wanted a loan from the Bank of England to start a computer company after the war but they didn't believe what he wanted to do was possible, even though he'd already done it (Colossus what classified for years after the war)

[melony]

They also downplayed Konrad Zuse in history because his story wasn't written by the WWII victors.

[jmeister]

Schmidhuber on Zuse v Turing:

(Turing oversold)[https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html]

(Turing: Keep his work in perspective)[https://www.nature.com/articles/483541b]

[jhbadger]

And this is particularly sad because unlike other German scientists of the time who were lauded like Wernher von Braun, Zuse never joined the Nazi party despite the pressure to do so.

[ElevenLathe]

Von Neumann style machines have basically won out, but its interesting to note that the PIC microcontrollers follow a Harvard/Aiken architecture, with different address spaces for code and data. There are therefore millions of non-Von-Neumann computers in the wild right now doing real work!

[kragen]

AVRs too. But in both cases they are stored-program computers; you don't have to reconnect the hardware to run a new problem on them. And they are commonly used to run interpreters, the possibility of which was the key insight of Turing's paper.

[egl2021]

Mentioning Eckert and Mauchly requires also mentioning Atanasoff, with whom they lost a priority dispute.