A little background for those who are interested.

During the beginnings of WW2 the Polish saw that the Germans were amassing armies of some magnitude and were certain that they couldn't hope to fight them. So they worked on cracking the codes that the Germans were using for communication. This was a fantastic piece of mathematics and was eventually put into practice via a machine called the Bomba.

The poles handed a copy of their findings to the British intelligence through a man called Knox, who would eventually become Turing's superior at Bletchley Park. It was later found out that Knox was also a homosexual, despite being married.

The enigma machine was altered after the Bomba was made, Turing analysed the code and mathematics and created a machine known as the Bombe. This was capable of cracking the enigma code by looking for contradictions.

This machine was later re-invented as The Colossus machines by a gifted engineer, Tommy Flowers. These machines were capable of cracking an enigma message in roughly 10 minutes. By the end of the war, the British were cracking the broadcasted Enigma coded messages before the Germans could themselves as they decoded messages manually using the enigma machine.

In 1945, Turing was awarded the OBE for his wartime services. He committed suicide in 1954, although this is disputed, especially by his mother.

In 2009 as the result of a petition, a government apology was issued by Gordon Brown for the way Turing had been treated.

"Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him ... So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."

I've had the chance to learn a lot about Bletchley park in my studies of computing history, and what a remarkable man Turing was.

A personal hero of mine too. *promote

Automatic upvote for awesome computer history.