Similarly, I first learned of Turing (other than the name and use of the Turing test in scifi I read) in a college cognitive psych class, which touched on his history and sexuality briefly. This would have been 1992-1996 or so.
Otherwise, a bit more from the very fictionalized variant seen in the novel Cryptonomicon and other fiction, with a bit of internet research on the side.
Otherwise, yes, my highschool history stopped prior to the Korean war for the US, and “World” History was at least 80-90% European and stopped prior to WW2 overall.
Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Which doesn’t remotely suprise me, seeing how little importance computers still had at the time. The single computer-related class I had in 16 years of schooling was a semester of BASIC programming on Apple II computers, and even that didn’t make any mention of the history of computing.
To the best of my recollection – which is admittedly feeble – I don’t think I learned about Alan Turing until computer science classes in college. And since the focus was computer science, nothing was said about his sexuality or his persecution under British law at the time. I think I learned about that independently much later.
I’m pretty sure that the concept of homosexuality was never even brought up in junior high/high school. Heck, our “sex education” consisted of one uninformative half hour lecture as I recall.
IIRC, he was given that option as an alternative to imprisonment. And the hormones had horrible side effects that are speculated to have led to his suicide. The way Alan Turing was treated severely tarnished my view of 20th century Britain as a civilized society, despite their many other achievements like the post-war NHS.
I graduated high school in 1976 and college in 1980. I learned nothing computer-related in high school; in college I learned a little, but nothing about Turing.
My own curiosity led me to learn about him later, and I knew about the Turing Test. But I don’t think I understood how he was persecuted for his sexuality until the 2014 movie.
Fer sure. Turing was barely mentioned in my schooling (again…in relation to Enigma) and they certainly would not have gotten into his sexuality and how the government treated him for it. No way, no how would that have happened.
I didn’t learn about him in school, but did learn about the Turing Test from science fiction. Possibly learned about how he was treated from a gay history book sometime later.
We had a year of American history in junior high and I took AP US history in high school, so there wasn’t any world history, IIRC.
As a EE, we only had a few programming classes and not any general computer science classes so that material would not have been part of the curriculum.
Brit here. I don’t think I was taught about it in school, but it’s enough part of our culture that I knew about his role in cracking the enigma codes and his unfortunate demise probably by the time I was a teenager.
The rest of his contributions to mathematics and computing, I’ve heard about gradually in the years since.
IIRC his case occurred at or near the height of the early 50s witch hunt against homosexuals and he would in any case have been seen as a security risk open to blackmail (and this was also the era of anti-Communist hysteria). Plus he naively volunteered the vital inculpatory detail.
Starting in Junior High I was (and still) fascinated by all things WW2 and read countless books about everything WW2 at the library. The weapons, planes, ships, Nazis, Japan, concentration camps and of courses the unbreakable enigma machine .
I belive I first heard about it on Hogan,'s Heros, so I read up on it. Thats when I first learned who Turing was, by being an overly WW2 obsessed teenager. Just learned his name and that he was a genius who broke the code. Didn’t learn he was gay and persecuted util I saw the movie during the pandemic.