The technology focussed magazine Techradar online put together a fascinating list of ten British scientists who shaped and influenced the development in computing to a significant extent.

First in the list is the 19th-cetury inventor, a “father of the computer”, Charles Babbage (1791-1871), who designed the difference engine and the analytic engine. One of his contemporaries was Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Byron, also known as Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), who developed close collaboration with the inventor. Ada Byron developed a gift for mathematics as a child, and became fascinated by Babbage’s ideas. Ada made an English translation, with an elaborate set of notes of her own, of the article on the analytic machine written in 1842 by the Italian military engineer Luis Menabrea. Her notes contain what is considered the first computer program. The United States Department of Defense named a computer language after her in 1980.

Sixty years after his death, the work, algebra and logic of Rev. George Boole (1815-1864) was (re-)discovered by Claude Shannon, who developed information theory. Even today, Boole’s logic is often applied in artificial intelligence research.

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was one of the most genuine scientists of the 20th century, who established, among other things, artificial intelligence research, produced a simplified model of real digital computers, an abstract automatic machine (the Turing machine) and a test to examine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour (Turing test). Turing contributed to morphogenesis, and wrote algorithms for the prototype Colossus that was to break German ciphers in World War Two. Colossus was designed by mathematician Tommy Flowers (1905-1998), who also worked at Bletchley Park, the secret centre of British codebreaking, and so did Turing’s mentor, 

Max Newman (1897-1984), who produced multiple blueprints for Colossus.

Maurice Wilkes (1913-2010) constructed the world’s first stored program computer called EDSAC, which was in service from 1949 to 1958.

Alan Sugar (1947) led for many years a company that was set up to sell computers branded Amstrad (acronym for Alan Michael Sugar Trading), now long-forgotten.

Sophie Wilson, born in 1957, is noted for co-writing the operating system for the BBC Micro and designing, in 1983, the instruction set for one of the first RISC processors, the basis of Acorn microcomputers. Tim Berners-Lee invented and worked on the World Wide Web between 1989 and 1993, and developed three basic specifications (HTTP, URL, HTML).