Its prototype Turingmachine uses a set of electroactive polymer muscles to push memory elements into place and squeeze piezoresistive switches, performing virtually any calculation through flexing.
Once you have a basic level of hardware functionality (what is called a Turingmachine) all kinds of applications can be created with a mixture of hardware and software.
There's also a 1936 first edition of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society where mathematician Alan Mathison Turing introduces the concept of a "universal machine, " an imaginary computing device.
Since the days of Alan Turing, the promise of a digital computer has been that of a universal machine, one that can be a word processor one minute and a robot brain the next.