Ask HN: If Alan Turing never died, could Britian have been Silicon Valley?

To rephrase your question: Was Alan Turing going to start a company that would have rivaled HP or Intel? I think the answer to that is no. Would Turing have put an unknown school like Stanford on to the map? Again the answer is no.<p>There have been some amazing technology entrepreneurs in England like Sir Clive Sinclair who were just as good as their counterparts cross the ocean. The thing is that there was no ecosystem to really support folks like this. Although to be fair in America there were some amazing companies outside of Silicon Valley that never grew an ecosystem that became larger (a good example might be IBM).

Turing was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn't a businessman or a charismatic leader. He did have a go at leading a computer development project (the ACE project) at a government lab, but got frustrated enough with the project and his role that he wound up decamping to what we'd now call a systems programming job for the machine being built at Manchester. And even his fellow academics regarded him as a bit of an odd duck, not always easy to get along with or even to understand. (Maurice Wilkes's memoir has some relevant anecdotes, including a conference talk in which Turing did blackboard arithmetic in the least-significant-digit-first notation that he'd adopted for the Manchester Mark I, to the general bafflement of the audience.)<p>There's a larger question, though, of whether something <i>else</i> could have made Britain a success in the computer industry. Especially since they briefly started to do that. It's not just that the British were hugely innovative (the group Turing joined at Manchester developed, among other things, the first index register, very early HLLs, and ultimately virtual memory). More importantly, they were also the first to deploy computers in industrial use. Ferranti's commercial version of the Manchester Mark I is arguably the first commercial machine to be delivered to a customer, and the LEO (a machine based on Cambridge University's EDSAC) was running logistics for a chain of tea shops in 1951.<p>So, why didn't these take off? A couple of possible reasons: First, building computers at the time was a very capital-intensive business, and there wasn't a whole lot of money for speculative ventures at the time --- both because "Venture Capital" in the way we're used to didn't really exist yet anywhere, and because postwar Britain was in pretty bad shape generally. Second, rather than try to create conditions that would encourage researchers to branch out to industry, the government had an explicit policy of trying to license British-developed technologies to all comers, notably including American companies like IBM. There's an MIT Press book on how this worked out; it's a dry read, but the title tells the tale: "Innovating for Failure."<p>(By the way, similar things happened in other fields: The Brits developed the world's first jet airliner, and wound up basically ceding the market to Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed.)