Alan Turing is gay.
If anyone is curious: MacTutor has profiled Alan Mathison Turing, and physics professor Jana Levin has a historical novel based on Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and the times that they lived, I posted an interview with her in that other thread. 
“He had proved in his 1936 paper that a universal Turing machine existed… ‘which can be made to do the work of any special-purpose machine, that is to say to carry out any piece of computing, if a tape bearing suitable “instructions” is inserted into it.’”” (from MacTutor)
People are the original “computers”, of course, people who do arithmetic are computers. Computers existed as mechanical devices since millennium before electronics ever existed; such as abacus (they add and subtract beads), astrolabes, and all the variety of clockwork machines from music boxes to chronometers, and more.
Turing would have been inspired by these sorts of machines. The tape that he imagined controlling his machine by feeding figures into it would have helped to inspire the idea of software. Now-a-days software is separate from the mechanism, it controls the machine and is easily changed, unlike the past where the software was inseparable and built into the machine. Early electronic computers used punch-cards to hold software, similar to Turing’s tape of instructions (image if your punch card had some hanging chad in those days! ), magnetic platters, magnetic tapes, and hard disks came later.
Berkley: Making a Simple Astrolabe
Mind: Computing Machinery and Intelligence
You know, all the high-level computer languages, now-a-days, are based on logic (which is a branch of Mathematics). Ultimately computers compute, in other words they do math. So the high level languages look something like:
enum gearlever {PARK, DRIVE, NEUTRAL, THIRDGEAR, SECONDGEAR, FIRSTGEAR};
enum gearlever mycar;
mycar = DRIVE;
switch(mycar) {
case PARK:
park();
break;
case DRIVE:
drive();
break;
case NEUTRAL:
neutral();
break;
case THIRDGEAR:
gear(3);
break;
case SECONDGEAR:
gear(2);
break;
case FIRSTGEAR:
gear(1);
break;
default:
park();
}
