Programmer John Graham-Cumming has launched a petition on a government website to apologize for prosecuting Turing for homosexuality. It took a full 13 years after Turing killed himself via cyanide-laced apple before Britain repealed its laws against homosexuality; it's now been 55 years since his death. In the meantime, Turing has come to be revered within his field as a pioneer — perhaps society has finally elevated its view of both geeks and gays enough that he can now get some real respect outside of it.

[via BoingBoing]

(Pic: Ian Usher)

First, Paul Baran discusses his invention of packet-switching while working at the Rand Corporation, which allowed for data to route through multiple nodes on a network, and the reception it received by then-monopoly AT&T:

The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.

Less than thirty years later, it was Microsoft's turn to play the heavy with their Windows monopoly when meeting with Marc Andreesen and the rest of the team at Netscape's offices in the Valley, as told by Netscape's counsel at the time Gary Reback:

A group of Microsoft executives came down to Netscape and had a meeting, and the Microsoft people in effect said that if you’re going to make a browser that can serve as a platform for new applications it’s going to be all-out war with us.

"You could say I was too lazy to calculate, so I invented the computer." The whole documentary is a lot of fun to watch — famed British thespian David Jacobi even makes an appearance in a dramatization as the legendary Alan Turing. Zuse and Turing were on opposite sides of World War II, with Zuse's machine mostly used to crunch numbers for the Nazis' rocket projects. Helping to keep track of the undesirables intended for slaughter in the concentration camps? That was IBM's job.