Introduction to information science

Turing Model
The idea of a universal computational device was first described by Alan Turing in 1937. He proposed that all computation could be performed by a special kind of a machine, now called a Turing machine. Although Turing presented a mathematical description of such a machine, he was more interested in the philosophical defini¬tion of computation than in building the actual machine. He based the model on the actions that people perform when involved in computation. He abstracted these actions into a model for a computational machine that has really changed the world.