She lived a fascinating life.<p><i>As one of a small cohort of young men and women working in the “Tin Hut” at Ferranti’s Moston works, Berners-Lee was trained to write programs following a manual written by Alan Turing.</i><p>That feels almost on the order of <i>She learned to kindle fire from instructiions given her by Prometheus.</i>
It's funny as every country has their own computer founding myths with them in the center.<p>"[...] became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I."<p>While Germany maintains that the first commercially sold general purpuse computer was a Zuse Z4.<p>Even the Wikipedia pages disagree in each language. I'm sure the French have their version of computer history.
For more on the British computer industry and why it was a failure despite being world-leading in the mid-1940s, see Marie Hicks' "Programmed Inequality". It's part of the venerable MIT Computer History series.<p><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality</a>
This is obviously a sad day for her family, but Insimply never knew any of this before now, and I am amazed.<p>Now as one of many, many freelance software consultants, discovering that she was probably the world's first, makes me a trifle teary eyed, and wonder if we have just found our own patron saint.<p>Is there a charity she supported?
>His modified teleprinter code turned letters and symbols on a keyboard into patterns of five hole-positions on punched paper tape that the computer could read directly.<p>In case anyone is confused as to what this means: I think it must have been written by someone who had no understanding of the content and as a result doesn't make sense.<p>Turing didn't modify the 5-channel teleprinter code at all : it had existed in some form since 1888[2] and 5-channel teleprinters were a "thing" in common usage at the time for telegraph messages, that were just re-purposed for use with computers. What he did was to define the machine's instruction set such that it could (with difficulty) be input directly on a teleprinter. It was of course _that_ encoding that he invented. The programmer would therefore type what looks like modem noise into a teleprinter, punching tape as they typed. The tape could then be loaded onto the Mk1 for execution.<p>Here's the manual they refer to in the article (with an amusing hand-edit by Turning removing the references to Ferranti and changing the machine's name from their MkI to his MkII):<p>[1] <a href="http://www.alanturing.net/programmers_handbook/" rel="nofollow">http://www.alanturing.net/programmers_handbook/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code</a>
I remember reading "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson, and the story of Sir TimBL and how he invented the WWW. At one point, TimBL says that Data Structures aren't efficient, and today's kids just superficially know the upper layers of the software stack, and don't know what really goes on at the transistor level. He also says that the limits of computing are only limited by your imagination.<p>Now I realize it actually runs in the family.
While not meaning to take away from the focus of the article and not in any way intending to disrespect Ms. Berners-Lee, I just wanted to point out this solicitation at the end of the article by the Guardian:<p>>Since you’re here …<p>>… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can..<p>I'm a bit heartbroken to read this mainly because I feel this isn't really sustainable in the long run. While, at the same time, I don't have a silver bullet to offer. (I did make a donation though)