You could not read this if it were not for Alan Turing. We probably wouldn't have won World War II without Turing. We'd certainly not be able to sell anything online without him, if we actually managed to have an "online" without him. So, rather than belabor the point, I'll simply set this picture of the Turing memorial, here, and remind everyone that today should be a holiday for all things computational.
Turing has become a near mythical figure to most computer programmers, so much so that Neal Stephenson placed him in his epic Cryptonomicon. There are numerous sites on the Web in which you can find extensive histories on the man and his legacy. Alan Turing dot Net is one such site. Some folks are actually already planning a major party to celebrate Turing's birth in 1912. Considering that we still have 3 years until that event, it just goes to show how much people love Turing! Other projects touch on his work tangentially, like the Mathematic Genealogy project.
Though he was plagued by the narrow-minded thoughts of the time, Turing has definitely come to be appreciated in his absence. After all, they named an award after him. I really can't think of any other computing pioneer whose name has been used as the basis for so many concepts.