The Science Museum in London have created a Facebook timeline of Alan Turing’s life and events afterwards. It’s an excellent use of the new Timeline feature – you can scroll up and down the timeline from Turing’s birth to the current day, which contains plenty on his codebreaking and work with early computers as well as more mundane things like his schooling and the invention of the very first chess-playing computer program. Appropriately, his tragic death is a small footnote to a fascinating life, just a couple of lines. Scrolling back up towards the present, you can see how Turing’s reputation was restored and commemorated, leading up to 2012, the Alan Turing Year.
The timeline can be viewed without logging into facebook, so you can still see it even if you don’t have an account.
Similarly, the Turing Digital Archive, which we posted about previously, is also a very interesting resource.