In 1948, Alan Turing joined the Computing Machine Laboratory led by mathematician Max Newman.
Newman was a British mathematician and codebreaker whose wartime work included leading the Newmanry at Bletchley Park. After the war, he became head of mathematics at the University of Manchester and established its Computing Machine Laboratory with Royal Society support.
Turing accepted Newman’s invitation and joined the laboratory in May 1948 as deputy director, although the position of director was not formally occupied. He worked alongside engineers Frederic Calland Williams and Tom Kilburn on the development of early stored-program computers.
The laboratory’s work produced the Manchester Baby, which ran its first programme on 21 June 1948. Turing then contributed to the design and programming ideas behind its successor, the Manchester Mark I. The laboratory later helped lead to the Ferranti Mark I, an early commercially produced general-purpose computer.
The main mix-up is with John von Neumann, whose computer architecture influenced the period and who corresponded with Newman. Von Neumann did not lead Manchester’s laboratory. Maurice Wilkes led the Cambridge EDSAC project, while Alonzo Church was associated with mathematical logic at Princeton.