One of my best teachers once told a class I was in something along the lines of: if you've never designed a Turing Machine you can't really understand how a computer works. I accepted the challenge and devoted quite a few hours (many of them on buses going home after class) to designing a number of very simple Turing Machines, and now I can proudly say that I still have close to no idea as to how a computer works.

On the other hand, I definitely did develop an appreciation for algorithms. So thank you Alan Turing. Today, like most of the rest of the computer world, I'm happy to at least pay a bit of lip service to your contribution to computer science.

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