ALAN Turing may have been the godfather of the computer, but his instruction manual for an early computer built at the University of Manchester, UK, was not a good legacy. According to Mike Hally, Turing’s “help file” was so complicated and full of errors that “anyone without Turing’s mathematical brain would struggle to follow it”. Just like some modern manuals, in fact.
Hally has travelled the world recording interviews with people who knew first-hand how the first electronic computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s. A small fraction went into a series of short programmes in 2001 on BBC…
