Turing's 1936 paper described a single universal computing machine

In “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (received 28 May 1936, read 12 November 1936), Alan Turing devoted a section to “the universal computing machine,” a single machine that can carry out the work of any other computing machine when supplied with a description of that machine on its tape. This idea of one general device that can run any program is the theoretical foundation of the modern stored program computer.