MODERNIZING A TURING MACHINE

Abstract

This project revisits a 42-year-old Turing Machine to port its arcane and cumbersome coding interface to new technologies. The original programming board is disassembled and analyzed, the machine process imitated on a microcontroller, and conventions that are easy to read, maintain, and apply to existing educational tools are applied to this new technology in hardware, for a product that has the appeal of its physicality and history with a newfound ease of use. We hope that this machine can find a place in our collective cultural history of computer science, and be a tool of historical and theoretical education.