Arguably it goes further back to Pearce and Frege, Boole, Pascal, Leibniz and all the way to Aristotle, who was probably the first to seek a way to formalise st

Arguably it goes further back to Pearce and Frege, Boole, Pascal, Leibniz and all the way to Aristotle, who was probably the first to seek a way to formalise structured thinking. Turing meant his computational apparatus as a formalisation of the way a human mathematician solves a problem by computation, i.e. by the manipulation of symbols according to a set of formal rules. In that, he followed in a long line of others who had thought about the same experience and how eminently mechanisable it is. Pascal was the first to actually do it, for arithmetic.