THE war on an abstract noun - terror - continues apace with news that a contemporary counterpart of the codebreaking centre Bletchley Park is soon to be opened in the UK.

The codebreaking work carried out at Bletchley Park during the second World War expedited the end of those hostilities. The codes and ciphers of several countries were deciphered at Bletchley, most notably the Nazis' Enigma code. Now, the British government hopes that the operations of terror fund-raising networks can be targeted using similar codebreaking analyses.

The most famous codebreaker to work at Bletchley Park was the mathematician, logician and cryptographer Alan Turing. Working in Bletchley's "Hut 8", Turing was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis.

He ingeniously developed the bombe - an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Engima machine.

After the war, Turing went on to create one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, but he is perhaps best remembered for giving his name to the Turing Test. This was based on an old and thankfully now forgotten parlour game called The Imitation Game in which a man and a woman go into separate rooms and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back. Unknown to the guests, both the man and the woman pretend to be the woman. What japes.

The Turing Test, however, replaced the man and the woman with a person and a computer. The idea here was to see if people could be duped into believing that a computer could pass as a person. This was to explore the question "can machines think?"

Turing was not only the most important founder member of the new discipline known as computer science, he was also one of the greatest minds of his generation. He has been denied his place in history because of a ridiculous incident in his personal life.

In 1952, Turing's partner, Arnold Murray, helped an accomplice to break into Turing's house. Turing reported the crime to the police. During his report, Turing mentioned in passing that he was having a relationship with Murray. For merely having the relationship, Turing was - it all seems quite shocking and bizarre now - charged with gross indecency under the Criminal Law act. (In 1952 homosexuality was still illegal in the UK.)

Turing was convicted and there was some murky deal done where he was told he could avoid imprisonment if he agreed to accept oestrogen hormone injections for a year. This is a barbaric procedure where the man grows breasts as a result of the injections. It is supposed to "cure" you of homosexuality. The conviction led to the removal of his security clearance and to him being shunned by academia.

Two years after the conviction, Turing died after taking a bite from an apple that had been laced with cyanide. His death was never properly investigated. He did know an awful lot about the workings of highly sensitive government matters from his time at Bletchley Park and had advanced computer science knowledge. There is a strong belief that, as someone vulnerable to blackmail from the Soviets, he had to be done away with.

He has remained a largely marginalised figure, although he is held in awe by computer science historians. But maybe his massive contribution towards helping to create the first ever computer has not been totally ignored. In fact, in all probability there is a reminder of Alan Turing and his groundbreaking work on your desk or very close to you at this very moment.

In her book Zeroes and Ones, author Sadie Plant says that Apple uses a daily and constant reminder of Alan Turing on its products.

The Apple logo is an apple with a bite taken out - is this Steve Jobs's knowing reference to the bite Turing took out of the cyanide apple? Officially Apple denies the Turing story. It says the apple logo is a reference to Isaac Newton (apples, gravity and all of that). But Newton, obviously, had nothing to do with computers. And why is there a bite taken out of Apple's apple if it's supposed to be a reference to Newton? The theory is that Apple don't want to draw attention to the Turing reference because they're worried that psychotic Christian nutcases might boycott their products if they thought a homosexual was the inspiration for the logo.

Remember Alan Turing and his magnificent work next time you turn on your iPod.