If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence I have ever encountered.
—Howard Aiken 19561
Let us now return to the analogy of the theoretical computing machines … It can be shown that a single special machine of that type can be made to do the work of all. It could in fact be made to work as a model of any other machine. The special machine may be called the universal machine …
—Alan Turing 19472
In the fall of 1945, as the ENIAC, a gigantic calculating engine containing thousands of vacuum tubes, neared completion at the ...
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