Editing Turing machine (section)

===1937–1970: The "digital computer", the birth of "computer science"===
In 1937, while at Princeton working on his PhD thesis, Turing built a digital (Boolean-logic) multiplier from scratch, making his own electromechanical [[relays]] (Hodges p.&nbsp;138). "Alan's task was to embody the logical design of a Turing machine in a network of relay-operated switches ..." (Hodges p.&nbsp;138). While Turing might have been just initially curious and experimenting, quite-earnest work in the same direction was going in Germany ([[Konrad Zuse]] (1938)), and in the United States ([[Howard Aiken]]) and [[George Stibitz]] (1937); the fruits of their labors were used by both the Axis and Allied militaries in [[World War II]] (cf. Hodges p.&nbsp;298–299). In the early to mid-1950s [[Hao Wang (academic)|Hao Wang]] and [[Marvin Minsky]] reduced the Turing machine to a simpler form (a precursor to the [[Post–Turing machine]] of [[Martin Davis (mathematician)|Martin Davis]]); simultaneously European researchers were reducing the new-fangled [[electronic computer]] to a computer-like theoretical object equivalent to what was now being called a "Turing machine". In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the coincidentally parallel developments of Melzak and Lambek (1961), Minsky (1961), and Shepherdson and Sturgis (1961) carried the European work further and reduced the Turing machine to a more friendly, computer-like abstract model called the [[counter machine]]; Elgot and Robinson (1964), Hartmanis (1971), Cook and Reckhow (1973) carried this work even further with the [[register machine]] and [[random-access machine]] models—but basically all are just multi-tape Turing machines with an arithmetic-like instruction set.