Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

6ONE MAN IN A BARN

Roger Johnson

X-RAY CALCULATIONS

The story of the development of the UK’s best-selling early computer used for commercial IT starts in the unlikely world of the crystal structure of explosives.

In the closing days of the Second World War a prominent British scientist, J D Bernal, was planning his return from war service to the quieter world of academia. He held the Chair of Physics at Birkbeck College, London University, and was planning to form a group of academics to examine the structure of crystals using X-rays, work which contributed in the 1950s to the discovery of the double helix. This involved solving large sets of equations, which, before computers, had to be done largely by hand using mostly simple electromechanical ...