[TheOtherHobbes]

It was a much scarier time because far more people were far more competent.

I doubt that if you took the smartest people today and equipped them with the knowledge and resources around at the time - and no more than that, so no modern insights or historical knowledge - they'd be able to do what Turing, Flowers, and the others did.

Reverse engineering and breaking an encryption protocol by hand and then mechanising it with just math and valve technology was an astounding achievement.

[tetris11]

Hogwash. Humans are masters of innovation, and are highly motivated to solve problems. None of these men worked from the ground up, but built on the groundwork laid down by others (Turing especially).

The world was arguably also less complex back then, so there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to snatch in terms of information theory

Don't let the Hideo Kojima's of the world fool you into believing they did everything themselves. It's an effort of many, many who do it for the love of the craft and are content to receive no praise for it

[cjbgkagh]

These people still exist, there just isn't the same institutional push to promote them to prominence so you don't know about them.

[SoftTalker]

Their adversaries had the same knowledge and resources: gears, relays, vacuum tubes. It was a fairly level playing field.

[colechristensen]

They were scientific revolutions ripe for the right people at the right time. These people are uncommon but they're always around, there was nothing particularly special about that generation or those few that found themselves where they did. If the events of the world wars didn't collapse civilization to the degree of the late bronze age collapse, the fall of the western roman empire, the Maya collapse, etc. then computing machinery was pretty inevitable in the span of a few decades.

You can usually make the argument that any particular scientific or engineering revolution would have happened anyway with different people nor more than 25 years or so later, at least any advancement since the mid 19th century.

[fragmede]

Except, why didn't the ancient Romans or Egyptians invent the Internet? They had enough civilization to build empires.

[colechristensen]

There's a tech tree, more or less.

You need steam power, chemical batteries, basic metallurgy, and the telegraph to make global communications networks obvious.

With constant conquest and expansion Rome was full of slaves which distorted the market need for mechanical power.

Hero of Alexandria made a little steam powered spinning toy which could have been the inspiration for steam power and the industrial revolution but it wasn't and the western empire was already on the path to decline. When the expansion hit its practical limit Rome fell apart instead of industrializing under the effects of Christianity and a series of decadent or just bad emperors.

Rome made ENORMOUS strides in the advancement of civilization when it came to organization and institutions it just didn't hit the industrialization spark and stopped advancing.